My father has been toying with getting a new pocket digicam, but he really wants more than 30-second cheesy video clips. This has started me thinking about all these weird trade-offs you can make with convergence gear.

- Do you buy a cel phone that happens to have some PIM features, or do you buy a PDA that happens to be a cel phone? Is it more important to have good sound quality / RF, or is it more important to have good software / applications?

- Do you buy a compact MPEG-4 video camera that can also do stills, or do you buy a compact still camera that can also capture short videos?

More interesting questions, if you put on your Moore's Law goggles:

- In the limit, will the very notion of still vs. video camera go away? Will a $300 Canon pocket camera double as an HD video camera? (And will it be able to transmit the signal to your DVR at home through the cellular network?)

- In the limit, will your cel phone gobble up every other thing you carry around with you (i.e., your keys, your wallet, your digicam, your MP3 player, etc.)?

My Mom's new car (a Lexus LS400 -- ugh) has a couple of nice features. One, the key is usually used via some sort of wireless interface. It just needs to be near the car in order unlock the doors and start the engine, and no buttons on the key need to be pushed. Two, the built-in cell phone attaches to her cell phone via Bluetooth (or would if she got that option, which she didn't). I'm pretty sure that it actually uses the phone as the transmitter/receiver, as it can't do SIM cloning over Bluetooth (or whatever it's called) as it supports non-SIM phones/networks.

What this means is that at least one car company thinks that Bluetooth is a practical in-car solution and that it could conceivably be used as a key. (Even though I don't think it's the technology used for the Lexus key, it could be.) So there's no good reason a Bluetooth-enabled PDA or something couldn't be used to activate a car. Of course, you'd still need a physical backup key in case power failed.

Of course the answers to your questions depend on the tasks you want the devices to perform.

I haven't seen any digital cameras that were good at making movies, and I haven't seen any movie cameras that were particularly good at taking still pictures. But these days they all do both, they just do one of the jobs well, and the other job poorly.

If making movies were important to me, I'd buy a movie camera. If making high quality still pictures were important to me, I'd buy a digital still camera. If both were important to me, I'd buy both.

I agree that it's kind of silly that the convergence isn't there yet on those devices. They both have CCDs and imaging software, why can't they do both jobs well? I'm guessing it has something to do with the type of CCDs, there must be important differences between the two other than just resolution.

I'd guess storage bandwidth and cost of high-resolution CCDs, personally. It's silly to include a high-res CCD in a camera that's going to be recording NTSC and it's silly to have high-bandwidth, likely non-random-access storage in a camera that's largely going to be making stills. If they made one, it'd probably end up costing 90% of the combined costs of the two individual cameras.

At least in today's technology, you'd have a lot of extra expense to make something that was both a good still camera and a good video camera. However, Moore's Law should drive down the cost of the sensors and electronics, making dual-purpose cameras that do both well more a question of when, not if.

Yeah. Lexus ~= Toyota.

The starter on hers is still a rotating knob with spring like in a normal car, but it doesn't require that you put the key in it.

I guess it all comes down to what you're really looking for. I got a Bluetooth phone because I knew I was getting a Prius. I was getting the Prius because I wanted a car that had REALLY low emissions. I got an EMPEG because it fits into my Prius (boy I wish those install pics were still here!) and I really like my music. Put your needs in order and then you'll have an answer. That's my somewhat inebriated answer anyway…..

Peter
Miami, FL USA

It just needs to be near the car in order unlock the doors and start the engine


Oh, that's handy. So every time she opens the garage door to let the cat outside, the doors unlock and the engine starts up?

Bet the cat just loves that...



tanstaafl.

No, obviously. The door thing is activated by a touch sensor on the inside of the door handle, so that the doors don't actually unlock until your touch it. The engine thing is obvious.

And I said that it needed to be near the door in order to unlock it, not that it would unlock it when near the door.

The door handles are probably different. You have to reach inside the handle in order to be able to open it. Being within three inches of the correct side of the handle means that you're touching it, or within a quarter of an inch. So you could be right, but there's practically no difference.

Still, I don't want to talk it up too much. They've done a good job thinking about how to make it work right (and the triangualtion thing works pretty darn well), but there are enough bugs in the system to make it irritating, IMO. There have been times where Mom has locked the door, realized she left something inside, reopened the door, then tried to lock it again, and it wouldn't relock until she restarted the car. Not handy.