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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

They are much, much better for photos. I will even say they are better for most videos chats.

They are better music players. They are better GPS nav systems.

They are better for taking photographs simply because they're smaller, but for every other aspect of photo viewing, management, and editing, they are worse. They have a tiny screen, insufficient local storage and compute, and no keyboard or mouse.

They're not better music players. Sound quality can be identical because phones support USB DACs, but again, everything else is worse. On a real computer I can easily search my library just by typing. There's no way to find specific tracks that fast on mobile.

I think they are also great for photo viewing, because they are easy to show to others. As the saying goes the best camera you have is the one you have with you.

Same reason I listed them as the best music players - I don't want to carry around a laptop to hear tunes. And while some audiphiles claim that they can hear a difference, I have never seen evidence that this is the case.

If you EQ your headphones, e.g. to match the Harman curve[0] to better replicate the sound of loudspeakers in a moderately treated room, you'll probably find they need a lot of bass boost. This means you have to turn everything down to avoid clipping, which hurts the signal to noise ratio. If you only listen to low dynamic range music you still might not notice it, but for high dynamic range music, like orchestral music with natural sounding mastering, you will probably be able to hear noise from low quality DACs in the quiet parts.

Fortunately, good DACs are cheap now, e.g. the Apple USB to 3.5mm adapter [1].

[0] https://headphonesaddict.com/harman-curve/

[1] https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...

>Same reason I listed them as the best music players - I don't want to carry around a laptop to hear tunes. And while some audiphiles claim that they can hear a difference, I have never seen evidence that this is the case.

For playing music when I'm at work, etc., my phone sounds MUCH better than my laptop that's sitting at home.

Also, even if we really did compare apples to apples, I'm not sure how the sound hardware on a laptop is going to be any better than that on a phone.

I generally agree with you and the parent post. But touch screen is the best UI for photo cropping. This is awkward because it makes me want to split editing tasks between devices.

Better than a Wacom tablet?

I've never used one. I know they're popular with artists but I have very little concept of how they're used. I would not have guessed that anyone uses them to crop images.

Given that what many touchscreen tablets (particularly e-ink) offer is a Wacom layer, the advantage is that you're getting far more precise indication of location. The difference between Wacom-in-display and Wacom-as-peripheral is much as with a mouse, in that you have to get accustomed to indicating actions off-screen which translate to on-screen movements, though in practice that seems to be a fast learn for most people. This can actually be better as depending on screen registration and depth of the display elements themselves, "direct registration" often isn't with offsets and parallax.

The precision of using a stylus and pen/pencil grip rather than a mouse, trackball, or trackpad is the primary win.

And yes, cropping is in fact a major function for graphic artists, though painting directly with the stylus + tablet is another option.

> insufficient local storage

My phone has 128gb. How is that not enough for photo editing?

Raw photographs are tens of megabytes each, and it's not unusual to take hundreds per session.

Agreeing and amplifying: Taking a random search result, the Canon EOS R5 has a 45 MP sensor: <https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/eos-r5?color=Black&type=New>

Assuming 24 bits per pixel, that's 1 Gigabit (128 MB) per image, or ~1,000 images on 128 GB storage.

Dedicated cameras have removable storage and professional photographers will carry multiple 500 GB -- 1 TB+ storage cards, swapping them out through a shoot.

I'll note that the iPhone 15 Pro specs list a 48 MP sensor, which is similar, though storage tends to be as jpeg rather than raw. Compression varies but sizes of 1/2 to 1/15 RAW at high quality are common.

Edit: Corrected GB -> Gb. Bytes are 8 bits.

>Assuming 24 bits per pixel, that's 1 GB per image

1Gb, not GB. And in practice it's not that high. Most digital cameras use a Bayer filter, with the pixel count specified as the number of grayscale pixels behind the individual filter elements. Raws are most often 12 or 14 bits per pixel, so about 68MB or 79MB for a 45MP sensor. This can be further reduced with lossless compression. Still a lot for a 128GiB phone, though.

Gah! Thanks, corrected above.

Thanks for the additional detail, I'd wondered about the bpp and individual colour-sensing elements.

Point remains that RAW images are large.

Indeed. They are also better (virtual) tape measures, contactless payment devices, crash/fall detectors, emergency rescue summoners, and, yeah, phones.

Turns out different form factors are better at different things.

> They are better GPS nav systems.

Android even supports access to raw pseudorange data from the GNSS chipset now. Today's phones support all the constellations and new technology like GPS L5. There's even a way to turn off things like duty cycling to maximize accuracy at the expense of battery consumption. Should be possible to set up centimeter precision relative positioning with these things.

They're better for some types of photos. For example, you'd never want to take a photo of something you'd want to measure quantitatively with a smart phone. They hallucinate all the detail.

The smartphone is the second best device for pretty much every task. For the vast majority of things, in which we’re not specialists, they are pretty good.

They are better readers as well. Often reading is followed by some form of writing though and then they are terrible.

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