Re: Are you Ready? F(x)tec Pro 1 HW Keyboard Phone
 

What about Australia? Specifically, Sydney?

Thank you. Best wishes.
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Per aspera ad astra...

Re: Are you Ready? F(x)tec Pro 1 HW Keyboard Phone
 

Why is camera "only" 12MPx? CPU limitation? Hopefully, with good optics and software, photographs will be fine. I have seen devices with 5MPx camera which take photographs of notably lower quality than Nokia N900.

If I remember correctly, AMOLED uses a proportionally smaller amount of energy when a smaller amount of display is active (unlike LCD which has to maintain display backlight at full brightness to display just one bright dot?). It sounds neat for a Motorola A780 form-factor. Granted, it would be an overload, to add T9 keyboard to qwerty slider?.. Yes, it would be a "brick", far from elegant, but still...

Either way, I wonder if it is possible to replace/augment capacitive (right?) touchscreen of fxtec with a resistive one. I have heard of resistive touchscreens for laptops, with USB connectivity - hopefully fairly standard USB input device, akin to a mouse, but with pressure sensitivity?..

Are there any internal IO connections for tinkering - such as, adding USB devices?..

Thank you. Best wishes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Per aspera ad astra...

P.S. Any plans for RGB backlight for keyboard?

Re: Are you Ready? F(x)tec Pro 1 HW Keyboard Phone
 

And a lot of tempting handsets and deals are getting released from now until then.... This really is a painful wait

Re: Are you Ready? F(x)tec Pro 1 HW Keyboard Phone
 

Hello Wikiwide.

I can't remember exactly but the SoC supports maximum about 55MP (or equivalent) image size so it's not CPU limitation.

I made the decision to use 12MP IMX363 for various reasons:

- First of all as you might know MP count does not reflect image quality. For any camera, the sensor size plays an important part. With mobile phone's sensor size being that small, increasing MP will often worsen the quality because the individual pixel is too small, and much of them became noise. (Maybe 808 is exceptional due to it's large sensor size)

- The sensor we are using has f/1.8 aperture and there are other option with much higher MP counts, from 13MP-20MP. However with "just" 12MP we can then get 1.4μm larger individual pixel and a better light.

- We don't want to join MP marketing war by over sampling the out put image size and waste memory / creating noise.

- Google's Pixel 3 also uses the same sensor.

If you want the camera better than the N900, then we will be very confident that you will be satisfied with the quality. :)

Re: Are you Ready? F(x)tec Pro 1 HW Keyboard Phone
 

The craziest thing is that some are after the most megapixels and then use vintage filters with noise to get the pics look nice. With N900 and FMMS compress I get them default (wife just doesn't like the quality when get's a picture from me).

Re: Are you Ready? F(x)tec Pro 1 HW Keyboard Phone
 

I noticed a comment in one of the youtube videos about the phone, I'm pretty sure it doesn't (possibly due to patent and money reasons) but are the keyboard buttons capacitive? eg swiping across the keyboard to scroll up and down the screen.

Re: Are you Ready? F(x)tec Pro 1 HW Keyboard Phone
 

Thank you for the detailed reply. I hope that upgrade to a different camera will be possible in the future - probably depends on how the camera is connected to motherboard - because I do not mind having a huge, bulky camera module on the back of the phone. Upgradeability may depend on what kind of connection exists on the motherboard for the camera module...

Google Pixel 3 is apparently legendary for great photographs - I hope that this advantage isn't limited to Android Camera app, because I am not going to run Android (I am more likely to try to get Maemo Leste running on Pyra).

Megapixel count is far from the only characteristic of camera/photograph quality. But when I take photograph, I want to be able to print an A4/or/A3 calendar with this photograph. A4 is 8.27in by 11.7in, right? At printer resolution of 1200DPI (some printers do have 2400DPI, but I doubt I have seen them), it becomes 9924 dots by 14040 dots. If dot=pixel, then 139MPx for an A4 photograph.

Yes, it's not a sane count. The generally accepted printing resolution for a quality photograph is 300 pixels/inch, which means that 9MPx photograph is quite sufficient for an A4 print. And also, printers nearly always leave white margins around the photograph - I guess that's how we found 5MPx photographs quite sufficient for our calendars.

Unless you have to crop something out of a photograph. But then, it would have been better to have used optical zoom in the first place? And optical zoom is a very rare feature in modern camera-phones...

Thank you. Best wishes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Per aspera ad astra...

Re: Are you Ready? F(x)tec Pro 1 HW Keyboard Phone
 

Do you have any updates on device development? Would love to know where the device is currently, development-wise and what issues you're currently addressing.
I know the device has already been revealed and it's a July launch, but I'd love to know how you're getting there and behind the scenes action

Re: Are you Ready? F(x)tec Pro 1 HW Keyboard Phone
 

About megapixel, I’ll admit I’ve been caught up in that from time to time though I know better as an old time hoppy photographer.
I even bought into the Huawei p20 hype and that was a disappointment, really disappointing. The Koreans has this odd software interpreting the light hitting the sensor and it gives this ugly digital look. Had the same issue with HTC back in the days and it seems like they like it like that (Korean manufacturers)?
I saw this shoot out between Huawei P20 pro and the old pureview 808. Side by side pictures not stating which was which until the end when pressing an ‘result’ button. And I picked all the 808 pics as my favourite ones as the P20 pros just had this ugly digital look whereas the pureview had a more original cellulite feel and look.
So if the camera component is of great quality, on paper, it doesn’t mean that the pics will be. Software is essential for the outcome.
I believe the 12 mpx will be sufficient for taking good pics if the software backs it up. Time will tell.
On a side note I was pretty happy with the 5mpx on the N900, even more so with the community developed camera apps that popped up over time here on TMO :-D
Though I must say that Sony makes some pretty good camera phones in there high end range, even the 960fps slow motion has a pretty good quality compared to Huaweis high end range that does the same.
I think this phone will do just fine in the camera department ;-)

Re: Are you Ready? F(x)tec Pro 1 HW Keyboard Phone
 

Cameras on smartphones weren't design to replace a true camera. On camera, there are asics which can fastly process photos, iso/noise process, optical zoom, mechanical stabilisation, raw output, etc. I'm surely not good to take pictures, however with a smartphone, I was never able to take a pict as good as with a low-cost camera, even without raw output.

You know, many profesionnal cameras had a 16 MPx sensor on less until few years ago. I don't think the quality was poor with them and that you weren't able to print this picts on larger support (well, ok, maybe big professional picts are actually some kind of panorama taken on few rows).

I agree, when you want to crop a photo, it's better when you have more pixels. However, I don't think we can compare the resolution (and the possibility to crop a photo) and an optical zoom. If you need a zoom, you should take a camera with an optical zoom, really (because of stabilisation, data processing, optical optimisation, etc).


When you take a picture, you usually think of how you are taking it. And next, it's fine or need only little editing. But when you take a pict and tell yourself "I still can edit it later", it means than you will think a second time how you want your picture (and sometime, you don't remember what you wanted when you took the pict), you spend more time to have the pict you want, and maybe you will have never the time to edit it, which means you have a pict which is useless. So really, if you want to print pictures, really, think about buying a true camera, even a low/mid-range one (but with raw output).