So the story goes that yesterday I discovered one of my handphone buttons had become detatched from the keypad; effectively driving its $200 trade-in value to an awe-inspiring $0. Now this wouldn’t be so bad if I knew where the stray piece of plastic was, as a little glue would do the trick, however I have searched high and low and turned my pockets inside-out… but to no avail.
This little misfortune, fortunately, gives me whatever feeble excuse I need to plan a phone upgrade next January. The K800i is a fine phone, but I have my reservations about switching over to a Sony-Ericsson, mainly because of brand-loyalty. That, and the fact that the N-series phones seem to have many more bells-and-whistles as compared to the K800i (yes, I’m a sucker for useless tech).
For further guidance, I decided to turn to the power of the masses.
A little poking around on Flickr confirms the popularity of the K800i:
(click to enlarge)
That yellow line represents usage statistics of the K800i against other Sony Ericsson models among photos submitted to Flickr. I’m assuming the inflexion where the flatlining ends and the slope begins corresponds to the launch date of the phone. The K800i is currently S-E’s flagship model, and thus its popularity comes as no surprise.
In the Nokia camp, however, things get rather strange. Take a look:
(click to enlarge)
For some reason, the N73 is wayyyy more popular than all other N-series phones, beating even the newer N80 by a rather large margin. Digging further, I suspect that the edge the N73 has over the other phones comes simply from the fact that it sports Carl-Zeiss optics. Theory aside, a brief search of Flickr by camera type confirms this. Have a look at some photos taken by the N73, then compare them to those taken by the N80. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions, but offhand (and I’m no imaging expert) it seems that the N73 somehow sports a larger dynamic range, leading to less white-outs. The N80 produces photos which appear dull and dreary, much like my 6680 does. Everything is bathed in a sickly blue or yellow cast, depending on the white balance settings. Sunny scenes look underexposed, and pictures showing sky always white-out.
I’m still quite unsure if it’s just my mind at work, but I’m pretty convinced that the N73 takes better pictures each time round, and thus, will be my choice should I go ahead with the upgrade.
Now all I have to do is wait till the N95 (sweet, sweet Mother of God) comes out in January, compare that to the N73 and decide if the perks of a 5 MP camera, two-way slider design, Wifi and an onboard GPS receiver are worth the price difference.
Gary :: Dec.24.2006 ::
A thousand words, Tech, Photography ::
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