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Last month, Samsung showed us a glimpse of its Galaxy Camera: A weird and wonderful mashup of the Samsung Galaxy S III and a long-zoom point-and-shoot. Even though what you’re looking at above is just a prototype, the camera works far better than you’d expect from a Frankensteinish combination.
It’s running the silky Jelly Bean OS over the same core specs as the Galaxy S III: the same 4.8-inch LCD touchscreen, the same 1.5 GHz quad-core processor. The addition of a 1/2.3-inch image sensor and a 21x optical zoom doesn’t slow the camera down at all. The pictures we saw taken with the camera looked sharp and beautiful, and the full-manual camera controls built for the touchscreen interface are very well designed.
Overall, we’re impressed at what Samsung built, and at £399, it’s a really decent price too.
To unlock more Android news, tips, and features, check out Samsung’s Your Mobile Life site over here.
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Why not just make a normal camera that can beam its photos directly to your smartphone with a minimum of fuss? Is it really necessary to have two sets of smartphone hardware in your pocket?
Of course, this assumes that the user already has a smartphone, but seeing as they’ve just spent £400 on a shiny piece of pocketable camera tech, I’m assuming that they’re likely to.
One assumes Samsung has done their homework on their being demand for this.
I think it is more about marketing than demand. The Android Galaxy range is a big brand, Samsung make wifi cameras that aren’t big sellers – so seems a sensible route to market and increase sales.
But also it may be a bridge device before they consider putting real cameras in smartphones and tablets.
Oh sure, but then I suppose there’s a difference between what’s in demand and what’s actually sensible…
A look outside any Apple store this morning could have shown you that.
That was an obvious dig… and entirely appropriate.
“Why not just make a normal camera that can beam its photos directly to your smartphone with a minimum of fuss?”
They have – You can send the photos from Samsung’s wifi camera to any Android phone once you’ve installed the companion app.
Though from a personal perspective, I can see the camera being very handy from the point of wandering around with dumbphone or a mifi – you’re not killing the phone battery to do all the manipulation that you’d normally have to do on an external device.
I want one!
if this was an actual phone i’d consider buying it.
If it was a phone I’d want.
An unadvertised bonus of this android-camera may help all those people who evidently don’t know whether they are looking forwards or backwards. You see a phone has on the back what is called its rear-facing camera, whereas this one has a camera in exactly the same place only in order to take pictures it is facing forwards – just like a camera! What have we learnt from this?
Well the front-mounted camera actually faces backwards and the rear-mounted camera actually faces forwards. Hope that’s all clear now, just give it some thought….please!