phone cam etc.

it was actually an overreaction in response to the "transfer of ownership" of my previous phone, a nokia 6610.

let's see, nokia 3230, megapixel camera (1.2 actual, not 1.3 as claimed on the unit itself), radio (never used), mp3 playback, 3gp capture and playback, expandable memory (up to 1gb, so saith a vendor at the Alabang Town Center's hall of cellphones). 6MB onboard memory (thousands of text messages!) - never found a way to transfer them to the included 32MB rs-mmc card, though.

the camera was semi-useful, in a very slow way - at least at megapixel resolution. in hindsight, it did seem to be quite zippy at the low default resolution, but i felt that it was absurd to have the megapixel capacity and not use it. unfortunately, the "shutter speed" at 1.2 was on the order of 5 or so seconds, so any action was a definite hit and miss situation. people needed to keep very still for photo-ops. night mode was even slower and much much grainier. all in all, a camera of dubious utility at its highest settings. consider it a camera of the very last resort, when nothing else will do or is available.

now, the sony ericsson k800i is another matter altogether (drool...) - but that's a completely other price league away.

this unit was my first symbian phone, part of the series 60 platform by that mobile phone consortium. coming as i did from previous nokia "native" operating system phones (3210, 6610), the difference in speed was remarkable. ...in a negative sense. the phone, likely taking it's cue from the camera, was slow -- requiring a "deliberate" approach. my housemate who has a similar phone has been able to hang the unit by being too fast on the keys.

one does adjust after a while, but there were times that the lack of speed was aggravating.

...note that most of what is written heretofore is in the past tense.

and for one good reason: the phone has died.

interestingly enough, prior to the demise of the phone, i had actually learned something new about it. well, the odd resolution that the camera provided, anyhow. it took pictures at a resolution of 1280 by 960 pixels. this had always struck me as a little off, because the standard 4x3 should be 1280 by 1024 pixels. one day, looking over the pictures that i had managed to save (slowly) over the pop-port usb cable, and wondering why pictures of my brother's car featured vertically squashed tires, i decided to try scaling the pictures to 1024 pixels high.

lo and behold! the aspect ratio issue was resolved. which did not answer the question of why the phone camera took vertically flattened images to begin with.

but that was the learning. a day later, the phone drowned.