Phone as a camera?
To all those who want to buy a phone as a camera, you might want to look up diffraction and after that we might be able to understand each other when we talk about resolution.
To all those who want an ultraportable computer in a phone, have a look on an ancient Psion Series V and see what fun it is to organize your contacts, do calculations with spreadsheets and type a thesis at a beach running on two AA batteries for a week with a 18MHz CPU and a 640x200 16 grayscale screen.
With this said, an iPhone is a very good phone, ok, a bit short on battery life, and a decent music player. I can controll most of it with the buttons on my cars steering wheel while it is charging in the glove compartment, callers and titles are shown on my car stereos display etc.pp.
It just bl**dy works as a music player and a phone, perfect! I had Win Mobile devices, Sony Ericsson m600i and P1i, Nokia E something and even a BB. The iPhone is the phone which just works as a phone without looking, and it makes a pretty good music player as well.
Only complaint, it doesn't work with Linux, at least up to now but there are some promising applications just around the corner.
I have some 15 real cameras, my 50 year old Leica M2 with the 51 year old Summicron blows every phone camera out of the water, even current compact digital cameras can't touch it. And that is my benchmark as an everyday walkaround camera! When I go out to take serious pictures, I have a DSLR with a sensor not much smaller than most phones!
When I have to calculate spreadsheets type a document or anything, I want something showing more than two or three cells at the time, make my display 1280x800 or bigger! And better make it 13" as well!
But for my phone calls, I take the iPhone over any "smartphone" all the time, it's the best phone I had since the Nokia 6310. Ok, I just got a Palm Pre from my company, this might be a bit better, it's smaller and I can have the messenger running while reading my mail, but I can do that on my netbook , too.
Oh, navigation, I forgot about navigation, that's build into my car, works fine, even in a tunnel because it's coupled to all those sensors in the car and can plot my way when there's no GPS reception.