Cheating innovation

I am under the impression that the quality of pictures one can take with a smartphone is one of the key… if not the top… selling points for every ‘flagship’ device marketed these days. As a result, the top smartphone models launched in the past few years featured an increasingly advanced camera technology and associated software. Recent examples from world’s top smartphone makers include a design reminiscent of a miniature Hubble Telescope’s camera array protruding from the back of the phone…

Is this a response to a genuine need among smartphone users? Does putting a third, fourth, fifth separate camera on a smartphone, or doubling (tripling?) the main camera resolution, adds genuine incremental value for the people? Or, is this mad race chiefly a hype – not dissimilar from consumer tech gimmicks like 5G mobile data speeds and 8K TV screen resolution? (I argue that very few people would be able to even notice the difference, yet to make use of it)

Are these solutions creating bogus problems for the people?

A few days ago, a friendly app on my smartphone alerted me to a picture I took almost exactly three years ago. I was still a newbie to Singapore, and on the night of 30th September 2017, I decided to take a snapshot of what must be the most often photographed structure on the island (see above).

I quite like the image: the buildings illuminated against a pitch-black backdrop of the skies… reflections of the colourful lights in the otherwise black water. It almost looks like someone removed the sky’s and water’s imperfections to emphasize the images that really mattered to me at that very moment. No ‘nightscape mode’. WYSIWYG.

And then, I checked the image file properties. It turned out I took the picture with my Blackberry smartphone. Equipped with just one camera, lacking an AI-powered software, and laughed at by many as the big loser of the otherwise thriving smartphone-land, it delivered perfectly against my needs.

Thinking more about it, there seems to be a deeper issue with the camera touting as the main story axis in smartphone marketing. The need it creates… and, responds to at the same time… is not about the picture quality. It is not about capturing the moment, nor about the real look of people or things. It is not about WYSIWYG – not by a long shot (pun intended).

The need that smartphone cameras respond to is the picture shareability. It is about the detail zoom-ability and the degree of better-than-real look. It is, ultimately, about the instant wow-ability.

Have you watched ‘The Social Dilemma’ yet?