Samsung unveils the Galaxy Camera: Does Android belong in your point-and-shoot?

Taken from: http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/135231-samsung-galaxy-camera-does-android-belong-in-your-point-and-shoot

Today Samsung joined Nikon in announcing an Android-powered camera. The Samsung Galaxy Camera weighs 305g, features a 16-megapixel CMOS sensor, 21x super zoom lens, a quad-core 1.4GHz SoC (probably Exynos 4), 8GB of internal storage, and runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. This compares with the Nikon S800c which also has a 16MP CMOS sensor, along with a 7x zoom f/2 lens and runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Since neither unit has shipped, we don’t know anything yet about how good they are as cameras, but we do know that the companies are trying to regain some of the ground they’ve lost to smartphones by integrating sharing right into their cameras.

Samsung promotes the camera’s Smart Pro presets as a quick way to capture the “perfect photo”.The Galaxy Camera’s display is an eye-opening 4.8-inch HD Super Clear LCD screen — much larger than the 3.5-inch on Nikon’s model — and Samsung has augmented its S Voice application with camera control commands such as “Zoom in” and “Shoot.”

Cloud-friendly camera

Unlike Nikon’s S800C, which is limited to WiFi connectivity, the Galaxy Camera is available with either 3G or 4G along with WiFi, although details weren’t available on how data plans would work. Samsung has announced that the camera has an Auto Cloud Backup feature which can save photos as they are taken through its AllShare service.

 Clearly both of these cameras are designed to play catch up with smartphones in the race to be the photo sharing device of choice. Photos have always been taken to be shared, except now that’s usually through an instant upload to services like Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram, not by laboriously printing out snapshots and showing them around. This has meant an irreversible trend towards the smartphone as the primary camera for most new photographers, and many experienced ones.

Is this the beginning of the super camera?

For photographers, there are a couple of critical questions about these new models. First is whether these cameras will have enough additional functionality to justify the added cost and weight when most people already have a serviceable camera in their phone. Second, and more importantly, there is still a big question mark hanging over Nikon and Samsung’s long-term intentions for Android. If Android cameras are just standard point-and-shoots with a smartphone OS bolted on for sharing, that’ll be a wasted opportunity. It would have been easier to create a camera that instantly tethered to a smartphone instead, and let the phone do all the work. There is an exciting possibility, if Nikon and Samsung do this correctly, to really unleash the power of Android to enable new photographic solutions.