nokia north

As far as I am concerned, Nokia makes the best camera phones on the market.  If you do not agree with me, you should take a look at some of the photos in the n82 photo pool over on Flickr if you haven’t done so already.  True, the n82 has been the closest mobile handset that I have owned that makes me blaze past the shelf of unused digicams on my way out the door without a second thought, but I am wondering how far off are we from mobile photography nirvana?

As the megapixel race has jumped from the point and shoot market to the mobile market, I am worried that some of the main features that make a great camera great will be lost as manufacturers scramble to get that old MP number higher and higher.  These are a few directions I would like to see Nokia’s cellular photography market explore.

For starters, I would love to see an nseries phone come with a tripod mount thread on board.  I can’t stand having to fiddle with my generic clamping tripod mount that did not have my phones in mind at the time of being manufactured, leaving my vital buttons clamped down or otherwise out of reach.  I know it’s probably not overly high on the aesthetic list on a phone, but I’d be willing to concede function over form in this case.  Why bother with a timer if you can’t easily be in the shots anyway?

Will the day come that we will see manual controls on a mobile phone camera settings screen?  I have been very impressed with some of the night time exposures i’ve seen taken on an n82.  Nokia has great point and shoot versatility, add to that, manual shutter options and you would have such a fantastic leap forward for the convergence of phone and camera.  The nseries phones certainly seem capable of a lot of things, I know personally that i would greatly prefer a more in depth camera settings (though they are quite good) as opposed to a bar code reader built into the handset.  I really don’t think I’ll ever, ever use that application.

I love the active shutter control on the n82. It is fast and responsive, and should be on every nseries phone.  I love the fact that i can have the keys locked, open the shutter and snap a photo, close the lens cover, and have the keys go back to a locked setting.  I was very impressed that Nokia designed this phone such that you can take a photo without having to touch a single key on the keypad.  Why the n95 doesn’t have this is beyond me.  The phone is already much thicker than any other handset i own, would i gripe over a minuscule amount of thickness added to the back of the phone in exchange for both the functionality and protection it would offer?  Not at all.

I would like to see the optical zoom offered on the n93 make a come back.  Cell phones have such wide angles to begin with, this was always a great feature of the phone that could combat that.  As far as optics go, Nokia has a great partner in Carl Zeiss.  It would be nice to see the sensors and lenses in the same upward battles as the megapixel race is right now, hopefully soon.

As I mentioned, the n82 is the closest we’ve come to convergence of phone and camera thus far.  That said, if Nokia could push it a little further and give us users who are looking for a camera specific handset the same features that are available on even the cheapest of point & shoots these days, i think they would have a winner.

We buy these expensive handsets based on their content creation abilities, I think it’s time that a photo taken with an nseries device should move from “Wow, that’s great quality for a cellphone!” to “Wow, that must have been shot with a Nokia!”

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