Now then, here’s something ye don’t see every day. For ages, now, cameras have been one of the most common features of pretty much every phone on the market, and people wibble and moan about how they’ll never be as good as real cameras, blah di blah, etc, and so on. Yes, it’s probably true, but still, they never shut up about it.
So imagine a situation where, instead of sticking a camera in a phone, someone’s gone and put a phone in a camera. It was bound to happen one day, right, and according to Engadget, that’s precisely what Polaroid has done, to create the Polaroid SC1630, a thingie that’s more a “phone camera” than a “camera phone”. And that’s intriguing, but is it any good?
Well, the camera side of things should be a no brainer, ‘cos it’s got 3x optical zoom, and, more importantly, a proper lens and sensor. Oh, and it’s 16MP, so it should firmly kick the backside of any other camera phone out there. The average top-end phone nowadays, like the HTC Sensation XE, has an 8MP camera, so 16MP with a proper lens and optical zoom is just exponentially more brilliant.
What has me worried, though, is how it’ll fair as a phone, ‘cos my gut tells me it might not be that amazing…
Y’see, there’s no word on what the processor might be, but the simple rule is that Android phones need better processors than cameras do (for example, the Sensation XE, above, or the Samsung Galaxy S II, both of which have dual core processors). So, if Polaroid have skimped on the processor, it’ll ruin the entire thing. The other big worry, as pointed out in the source article, is battery life, ‘cos it’s only got a 1020mAH battery, which’ll last approximately no time at all.
However, it should be noted that this is clearly a prototype, so the spec could change. The build quality hopefully will change, as well, ‘cos it’s not put together that well, at the minute.
So, I remain cautious, but damnably curious…
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