On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 4:15 AM, Noah Birnel <nbir...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 04:49:52PM +0100, sta...@cs.tu-berlin.de wrote: > >>... a mobile phone with integrated camera, >> touch screen, 'apps' for learning languages, etc. is as much suckless as an >> axe with a door bell, toilet paper and nuclear power generator. >> > At this point a mobile phone is a general purpose portable computer. The > camera is no more out of line than the speakers hooked up to your home > box.
I partly think it's perception shape by marketing. You can still buy a mobile phone that only has voice functions. You can also buy a more general communications/entertainment node device which has a host of hardware and software that's all appropriate to that usage, including as one component making voice calls. The only problem is that they're still marketed as "phones" which seems to cause cognition problems for some people who seem to take is as gospel the label marketers use must be right and therefore that the device is wrong, rather than vice versa. (I've never subscribed to the philosophy that an entity should "do one thing well" but rather that "there should not have non-orthogonal capabilities in the same entity". If you're into that sort of thing, I don't see any reason why you'd consider mobile photo-taking, internet browsing, causual entertainment games, etc, to be non-orthogonal to chatting to friends: they're all ways to entertain yourself while not at home.) -- cheers, dave tweed__________________________ computer vision reasearcher: david.tw...@gmail.com "while having code so boring anyone can maintain it, use Python." -- attempted insult seen on slashdot
