My Camera's Last Remaining Advantage is a $1.99 Wrist Strap

Two years ago, I predicted that smartphones would replace dedicated cameras for the majority of consumers. I also had the smug notion that caring about aperture and exposure values would forever leave me with a "proper" camera. All it took was a trip to a damp Northern European island to show how wrong I was.

Lighting conditions in Scotland are challenging at best. You are usually dealing with a cloudy sky that gives you the choice of overexposed light grey overhead or an underexposed shadow of your subject matter. High Dynamic Range photography takes multiple exposures and composites them together with a bilateral filter to make the local gradients appear natural, enabling all the detail at each exposure to stand out. Though I had a choice of cameras for most subject matters, time after time I kept reaching for my phone's HDR camera over my high-end point-and-shoot.

HDR, 5MP phonecam	Single-exposure, 10MP PowerShot
Sky has blue, foreground a bit neon but properly exposed	Sky overexposed, foreground good

The trend will likely continue. The next versions of my camera (the Canon S95-110) have an in-camera HDR feature, but the camera's weak processor necessitates less-advanced image matching that creates ghosting and other artifacts. The matching and quality of the on-board image processing from my year-old smartphone is strong enough to handle moving objects in the foreground and whatever else I throw at it. The processing gap will only grow over time as camera manufacturers have a hard time justifying 8-core processors and other beasts. The science of optics has been stable for the last hundred years or so, but we're just beginning to experiment with superresolution, adaptive lighting control, and light field rendering. The action is in processing, not optics.

At this point, the most notable advantage that my point-and-shoot has over my phone is a wrist strap; I feel more comfortable dangling my well-secured camera over a canyon edge than my smooth, featureless slab of a phone. Build a retractable iPod Touch-style "loop" into my next phone and I may not bother bringing a dedicated camera along on my next vacation.

One Corner of the CE Space That Hasn't Converged Yet

My kayaking loadout now includes three distinct pieces of waterproof electronic gear. These provide me with communications, image capture, and navigation. The same functions (and more) are all provided by my smartphone in one handy package, but it doesn't perform nearly as well under salt water immersion. For now, I'll stuff a bunch of dedicated devices into my PFD. So many other bits of electronic ephemera have already vanished into our phones that using 3 specialized devices feels wierd.

	+		+		<
waterproof VHF radio		waterproof camera		waterproof GPS		non-waterproof phone

Check out this guy, for example. Yes, he's an absurdist parody. Consider, however, that today our MONDO 2000 friend could fold his money, video cam, minidisc, scanner, display, microphone, video players, cell phone, voice changer, powerbook, pager, gps, and still camera into a low-end smartphone. And by the way, he wouldn't need the now-defunct wood-pulp magazines either.

One waterproof phone may replace all that single-purpose gear someday so I'll look less like a waterproof version of the 1995 cyberdude. Anyone want to make a case for a phone with a built-in stun gun?

Large-Format Phone Comparison: Galaxy Nexus (2011) vs Handspring Visor Edge (2001)

When the Galaxy Nexus was first announced, tech wags speculated that its 118mm screen would just be too big and clumsy to handle. As a recent owner I can report that it is large but certainly not unwieldy. In a fit of house cleaning, I dug up my very first smartphone and thought it would be fun to post some pointless back-to-back size comparison shots.

The Samsung is just a bit narrower and shorter than the Handspring, but some of that width is accounted for by the Visor's elegant stylus. The big difference is in usable space: the Nexus is all screen, and a beautiful 720p HD screen with black blacker than blackest night at that. The Visor has a tiny monochrome screen with the rest of its face taken up by hard buttons and the graffiti writing area. (Hey - don't dis graffiti. One of the first things I did with my Nexus was to install a virtual graffiti keyboard.)

Flip them on their side and the contrast becomes more stark. Handspring was founded on the idea of "springboard modules", little hardware accessories that gave you an mp3 player or a camera or any of the other million things that our phones just take for granted these days. The Edge was meant to be the slimmest, sexiest of the Visor line so its springboard modules required an ungainly "shoe" that more than doubled the thickness of the device. The one and only springboard module I ever purchased was the phone add-on, which further had its own battery pack. From the side, this assemblage was a real porker. Still, it was kind of nice to be able to ditch the phone bulk when at the office and still walk around with a svelte little metal PDA.

It was my dream that someday I could have a phone with the form factor of the unadorned Visor Edge. There you go: 10 years later my Nexus is almost exactly the same size as that device. Progress!

Most Innovation Is Invisible

Neal Stephenson's recent talk on "Innovation Starvation" strikes a nerve in every engineer: we don't build anything anymore. With the end of high-visibility mega-projects like the space shuttle, it's an understandable notion. Another way to look at it is that the innovation of our era is incremental and invisible.

The telcos have invested billions to create a worldwide high-speed mobile data network. The only manifestation of this gigantic project is the occasional poorly-hidden tower disguised as a tree. In exchange, we are never lost, can always meet our friends at an event with no planning, are always informed, record or reference any memory, and can travel in unfamiliar places like a local.

Our electricity system is undergoing a seismic shift away from coal and toward natural gas. For the last decade, 90% of the new generation capacity in ISO New England has been highly-efficient, relatively low-carbon combined cycle gas turbines. If each of these replaced a coal plant, you're talking an avoided-carbon equivalent equivalent to a few hundred wind turbines. Cape Wind is a big, visible project with a high feel-good factor. But the invisible innovations in natural gas exploration that have made this cleaner fuel relatively cheap have had much more impact.

Even the military (which used to spontaneously generate battleships and bombers like aristotelian flies) is assembling its toys from loose networks of small parts. The drone that just executed Anwar al-Awlaki is a fragile model airplane connected to a bunch of satellites, a guy in a trailer in Nevada, and world-class intelligence gathering.

To a generation that grew up on glossy books showing us the Future in its flying-car glory, this is all unsatisfying stuff. Sure, practical supersonic transport would cut my flight duration to Europe by a few hours. But the ability to rent a bike in Boston and return it in Cambridge saves more time per year. There is plenty of innovation happening, Neal. You just need to look with different eyes.

My Mobile App: BostonBikeLane

A while ago, I asked for your help in developing a smartphone app for cyclists. The 6.083 mobile app development class is now over and I proudly present the completed app. BostonBikeLane reports cars blocking bike lanes to the city so that these areas can be targeted for additional enforcement. This short video explains it all:
Next step: present to the city!

Dev Project: Boston Bicycling Mobile App

Your smartphone is a sophisticated, connected sensor platform. The City of Boston is rolling out apps to improve quality of life through its "new urban mechanic" initiative. Through apps like Citizens Connect, we can report graffiti, get streetlamps fixed, and (maybe) even automatically detect potholes. I am working on a project with Nigel Jacob, owner of the mechanic project. As a cyclist, I'm prototyping a mobile app that will make life better for bikers in Boston. If it looks good, his department may invest the time to release it as a production-quality system. This would be a great and low-cost way for the Mayor to follow through on his promise to make the city a "cyclist's dream."

Here's my question for you: What do you want? How can we help? What cycling frustrations could be solved with a mobile app? A few ideas to start the conversation:

• Need: finding bike lanes. Help with route planning.
• Frustration: cars parked in bike lanes. Submit photos of offenders? Automatically detect swerving into traffic when in a bike lane?
• Need: automatic dispatch of police/ambulance after an accident. Detect sudden deceleration followed by extended immobility, message 911 with current location.

How can we use technology and the support of the city to make this a great place for cyclists?

Image licensed Creative Commons by abbyladybug.