If the camera functionality is that much better, some customer segment might be compelled. It's hard to say until the product is available.
Future iPhone customers will benefit from this product release. If it's at all better, you better believe this will only push Apple's camera engineering team harder.
Source: https://www.dpreview.com/news/7643905711/kodak-launches-ektr...
It seems that Bullitt can innovate, their camera-phone for Caterpillar has some thermal imaging aspect to it. Here I think they have gone for nostalgia with the name and form factor rather than innovation. There certainly is no leveraging of Kodak's patent portfolio going on or anything truly new brought to the product, a decent interface with a few more advanced settings is expected.
I think an opportunity was missed here. Kodak made photography accessible and easy, that could have been the thing here with an auxiliary camera that worked with someone's phone to bring decent zoom and optics to them. They could have also made the camera double up as a recharging brick so there would be reason to always have it with you. If it also had USB-C storage for your device with cloud backup and some VSCO service for the pictures then it could work.
The first Kodak digital cameras for the pro-sumer market had a programming language that you could use to get the camera to do things. You could get it to work out the height of a building by focusing on the top and then the bottom - it would do the trig for you, fantastic. Maybe a Kodak camera could revisit this and make it work for the IoT connected world, so the Kodak camera could be set up to do ad-hoc CCTV, timelapse and other things. Or just a remote camera for taking selfies, a market could be made for that even if the product was sold on doing super clever stuff. Instead there is this nostalgia trip.
So basically a high-end smartphone like we have today that isn't "Half a millimetre thinner TM" but a full centimetre thicker.
Now that would be innovative!
https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-mods/incipio-offgr...
But I will say that I doubt this will impact iPhone owners at all; Kodak would have to demonstrate some truly amazing tech - be it lenses, sensors, or image processing - that can blow iPhones out of the water. And I just don't see that happening. They're touting... filters. Ok, maybe be charitable and talk about the editing experience with access to raw camera data - histograms! - but iPhones just got that too. So it's parity, at best.
What DOES put pressure on the iPhone is the new Pixel that came out of nowhere with a ridiculously good camera. Everybody (ok, "I") thought Apple's camera and picture quality was one of their biggest competitive advantages, but clearly, great photo quality is more commodity now.
Certainly those on the page seem to be very noisy and strangely lit even when scaled down to thumbnails. i dunno, maybe it's like "hardware instagram".
Phone cameras are orders of magnitude worse than the cutting edge cameras when it comes to light sensitivity. It's just physics, there are only that many photons falling into the lens.
That aside, that's not really the point at hand. The hypothesis is that there is still a value desert between smartphone cameras and DSLRs that isn't adequately filled by traditional point-and-shoots. And perhaps, Kodak could uncover some by pairing a pocket space computer with a data connection and a better lens (think about what Nokia put on their smartphonecamera) but dropping the phone requirement. This Ektra isn't it, obviously, but it might be a step in that direction.
* Wirelessly transfer images to my phone.
* Do so with a tap, as it has an embedded NFC tag. (Sets up a wifi-direct connection.)
* Be remotely controlled by my phone, including a laggy but usable viewfinder display on my phone screen.
Cameras that are phone accessories already exist, and they're pretty cool.
It didn't fly largely because it was running a 3rd rate OS that no one really wanted.
But anyway, there is probably a customer segment, but it might not be that large.
But the camera design language make sense, i think, especially the leather and larger knobs - even on a phone.
Functional-ish instead of apple minimalist - at least I can tell a difference from the rest.
But then maybe they should have a real lens and not a faked plastic thing around it to make it look bigger.
Good idea. I'm going to try that and see what happens.
My fp has amazing battery life compared to my sp and I can tether through it for my 7" tablet. Its a great combo
Given that outside US and a few other countries they have a market share around 20%, and most of those countries use pre-paid mobile phones, I think there are plenty of opportunities there.
I worked at Nokia at the time. The Lumia 1020 didn't fly because it failed to ship with an OS that was considered "good enough" (and yes, "good enough" means "has apps") by consumers.
A Lumia 1020 with Android would have sold better (and shipped sooner)
That said, Nokia has had multiple devices over the years that had a heavy focus on camera.
[1] http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp
You meant Google Pixels are ... (latest iPhone is not even in the top 3 groups of smartphone cameras)
Source: https://www.dxomark.com/Mobiles/Pixel-smartphone-camera-revi... </Nitpick>
I'm not sure why you assume that. The form-factor isn't particularly weird and the specifications are excellent. If they're sensible enough to use bone-stock Android, I expect that it'll be a very good phone.
Otherwise, I can't imagine the phone part could be that much worse than Apple.