This device is not made by Kodak. It's made by a British company called Bullitt Group that is licensing the Kodak name.

Source: https://www.dpreview.com/news/7643905711/kodak-launches-ektr...

That is the key insight here, particularly when you see what other branded gadgets this Bullitt Group have, Kodak have just become a brand name that can be licensed by third parties. There is no connection to the Kodak we know, impetus came from outside.

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.

Here's a neat idea: a smartphone, with a great camera, that doubles as a recharging brick. For itself.

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!

You say, and it's here (Moto Z mods)

https://www.motorola.com/us/products/moto-mods/incipio-offgr...

Another one would be a 6" slider with a decent keyboard, like the original Droid. There are people actually composing serious documents on the go (e.g. lawyers, journalists), that would love it

So basically like n900... I miss it so much.

I should have kept both of mine, but the platform was essentially dead and I had to move on. These days there are two potential replacements for such a device, one is a continuation of the platform, the Neo900[1], the other is the Pyra[2]. I'm going to save up for a Pyra since it's half the cost of the Neo900 and looks like a more capable platform. I don't need a device like that anymore, given how good smartphones have become, but it would be nice to have a pocketable true computer with a keyboard for certain situations. The mobile retro-gaming aspect also appeals to me.

[1] http://neo900.org/

[2] https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/

Kodak is an "innovators dilemma" case study, and what they're doing by bringing in an outside group to compete with itself is exactly one of the solutions that is often prescribed.

Kodak is bankrupt. The old company no longer exists, and is being run by its creditors. If they can make back some of their losses by licensing the name, they absolutely will do so.

They did have an innovators dilemma back in the 1970s when they developed (one of?) the first digital camera. They didn't do much with it.

Certainly - Kodak has been making some big, bold moves in an attempt to stay alive. They're not dying quietly, that's for sure.

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.

Maybe. If the quality of those test shots on the OP are anything to go by I doubt it. I have some very similar outdoors photos (overcast and green) from my Nexus 5X which at least to my eye look a lot better - http://imgur.com/a/3U9sv - and allegedly the Pixel is even better still.

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".

I have a similar experience with the Nexus 5. The photos look good. But the ergonomy is horrible. It isn't a camera, it's a smartphone. I can't hold it still for 5 seconds. And I almost always block the lens with my hand because they put it in the corner. It's great for taking shots of cats and having it always on you but if you ever used a good camera, then it's no replacement for a real camera.

It's Kodak. They don't have much to lose. I wouldn't necessarily call it a risk.