Tech Wars: Mobiles vs. Cams/iPod

Mobile Phones Versus iPods/Canon

It is finally happening. After a long wait, iPod will soon see some serious competition, not from the side of Microsoft, but from the likes of Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Actually not iPod but iPod mini (has smaller hard disk capacity). Sony Ericsson has come out full force with what they call as Walk-man Phone - W800. Nokia has recently launched its N series mobile phones which it dubs as iPod killers. These phones have a whopping 4GB of memory built into them. While the Sony Ericsson mobile phones are based on their own OS and are Java enabled, the Nokia's N Series run on Symbian series 60 platform. The strenght of SE W800 is whopping 30hrs battery life, while Nokia fails on this front. Similarly iPods also have a good battery life. Sony Ericssons good MP3 performance was seen in their earlier phone SE K700i (my phone, but lacked in external memory card support - the only drawback). From Nokia stable the best phone in N Series offering is N91. This is probably the only N series phone hving ability to compete with iPod and SE W-800. Also with SE W-800 the benefit is that with phone off one can still listen to MP3s, is this present in Nokia N Series is not known yet. Also, Nokia N Series is priced at a very high end. One big decision one has to take is whether he uses phone as a phone or a walkman. The prices of both phones is higher than iPod mini. The war has just begun. Its a three way war Apple vs. Nokia vs. Sony Ericsson. No one can say for sure, where will the customer head to. This is where we marketing guys have a role to play. If you are actually looking for a walkman phone, look ahead, go in for SE P-910 smart phone. If you wanna spend money - spend it wisely. Its a smart phone, really capable of playing MP-3 and has Symbian OS running it. And as of now its the best smart phone available in the market.

Now Canon versus Nokia versus Sony Ericsson. Well as can be seen on my PhotoBlog Sony Ericsson's mobile Camera (K-700i at mere 0.3MP) clicks good snaps if proper light is there. One thing which should be clear about mobile cams is that they need good light to click good snaps, this is because they lack a flash light (can you imagine a flash light sucking your mobiles battery everytime you click a snap). Now again here pitted are earlier mentioned phones from both the companies - SE W800 and Nokia's N Series (with N91 being best. Both these phones feature 2MP camera and Nokia N91 has 20X Digital zoom (keep in mind DIGITAL ZOOM and NOT OPTICAL ZOOM). Also Nokias phones are almost the double the cost of decent digicams having around 5MP and a good OPTICAL ZOOM and over it Digital Zoom. While Sony Ericsson's offering will be slightly higher than these digicams. Here also, priority needs to be seen. And before setting priority one needs to also check out an offering by Samsung - SCH S-250, its the world's first 5MP camera phone. But till the time camera phones are not integrating Optical Zoom also as a part of the phone, till then for digital photography one should prefer stand alone cameras, else any mobile phone having a lower resolution cam around 0.3MP to 1 MP should be preferred. It will help you save money for a good Digicam. Camera Phones are meant to click photos as and when they happen. This is because there are occasions when you don't have your camera, but mobile is always with you. So the higher pixel range camera is not required in a mobile phone. Even a 1MP camera phone will be useful, since the snaps clicked by these mobiles will be of print quality. Till some more innovationin the field of incorporating Optical Zoom in camera phones does not happen, the clear winner in this battle is stand alone Digital Camera with a low resolution camera phone.

BUT technology is growing at an unimaginable speed, thus this topic will keep on cropping up year after year.