How Things Change

Steven Frank, reviewing the then-brand-new Danger Hiptop (from the team that went on to create Android):

The camera application lets you store up to 36 postage-stamp size color photos with the included camera attachment. The camera is about the size of a quarter, and maybe half an inch thick. It attaches to the device via a mini-jack, and thus can be swiveled in any direction. The camera application shows you a preview of what the camera is seeing, updated every couple of seconds, and you can choose to capture at any time. Once stored in the album, pictures can be emailed straight from the device as .jpg attachments. The quality is about what you’d expect from a quarter-sized camera. Not great. But it is a very fun “extra” which I’m glad they added. Being able to be anywhere, take a picture of something, and email it to someone, is pretty darn cool, even if the image quality is not really sufficient to be useful for any practical purpose.

I re-read this after fixing the link from my post linking to it back when it was new — which was so long ago, it was before Daring Fireball even had linked list entries.

Update, November 2024: Internet Archive copy of the original.

★ Tuesday, 6 May 2014