Succumbing to the Camera Phone

I do not like camera phones in the same way that I don’t particularly care for flash photography; you can produce good results (or at least passable results) with either, but the majority of stuff that comes out of it is just pure crap.

I recently moved to one of Sprint’s CDMA Android offerings, the HTC Hero. I just finished the flashing/rooting process, since I don’t particularly care for devices that try to lock me out of their own functionality. (The key to doing this with the “newer” Sprint CDMA Hero phones is apparently using an older version of the recovery image and making sure you have enough available memory to run the image flash, but that’s beside the point.) This particular device came with a 5 megapixel built-in camera, and though I know that resolution != quality, it does seem to produce *passable* images. Not great, but passable. I’m hoping to see an improvement when the CDMA Hero sees “official” Android 2.1 support. This OS version fragmentation is bunk, but at least I can upgrade as soon as the pieces are available for another model. Suck that, closed source technology.

Am I giving up the 40D? Hell emphatically *no*. But I can capture a few things I might miss fumbling for the camera bag. At least, I hope I can.