Awakening said:
God Ginrai said:
Heaven forbid we take the 20 extra seconds to take the camera out our pocket, use it, and put it back. Normally you take many pictures with a camera, and then you take out the SD card later, not one picture at a time. I'm saying that if you want a camera, then just use a real one. Swiss-army knives are cool, but when you try to apply that methodology to everything you own, then that's just a stupid waste. I would much rather carry around a cell phone, Pandora, and a Nikon than carrying around a Pandora with a bad built-in camera, and cell-phone support. (hello SideTalkin')
-God Ginrai
You have not understood the idea of a camera on the Pandora then. It is all about instantly taking a single picture, either for personal use or to share with others. The idea is not to replace a real camera which you would use for more serious photography.
+1 to this and the above comments on augmented reality and barcodes (it's worth noting that some really interesting things, including games, are beginning to appear on that front). Speaking for myself, I feel like one of the key purposes of a UMPC-style device is to assist in capturing relevant information while on the go, and with modern technology, I think it's realistic to expect such a device to cater to the visual and aural senses (sound and vision, simply put), allowing both capture and playback on some level. The Pandora is well-endowed in terms of sound, with both a microphone and playback devices (speakers + audio jack); as for vision, the lack of a compact, convenient way to capture visual data is somewhat frustrating for me.
That said, this probably doesn't matter much if at all to most of the people who want to use the Pandora for old-school gaming, but as one who belongs to the subset of people who wish to use the Pandora as a mobile general computing option as well/instead, it feels like a frustrating, if minor, loss - especially since the internet is such an intensely visual medium these days.
Features like accelerometers and GPS would be nice if they fit, but in terms of capturing useful information in a variety of situations, I don't see an accelerometer as being as useful. I don't know much about GPS systems, but my feeling is that there's so many dedicated options out there that, if you really need a good GPS service for travel, you're probably better off getting a specialized one - but that's probably a matter of much debate, too.
As for cell network services and such, I would really dislike seeing functions tied to what is fundamentally a paid service embedded in what's very close to an open source-style device, and with the way the network services change and upgrade and so forth, it's probably better to just rely on an external cellphone, in my mind, or to use tethering if you want to get the Pandora involved, as has been previously suggested. Hope I'm making sense. :huh:
