Hacker News Reader

Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

Needs more ™s.

USB-C and LTE, but a 0.3 MP camera is a very odd combination. I'm impressed that it's even possible to source a camera module this crappy in 2024.

View on HN

USB-C and LTE is pretty much required. I suppose you could do a 2G phone, but that might also be hard to source parts of.

But the camera, not sure why you'd even bother.

Aren't 2G networks getting switched off globally?

I thought so too, but looking into it yesterday, what seems to be happening is that 3G is being shutdown. The largest GSM network in Denmark is 2G, 4G and 5G.

But my clear understanding was that 2G was long gone, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

Interesting. Thanks

It depends on where you are, some carriers are choosing to maintain GSM while shutting down UMTS, mainly because 2G serves a good fallback voice, SMS and IoT communication system, however insecure(!) it is. Both 3GPP and GSMA didn't really develop a successor to GSM (a basic, reliable, low-powered communication standard) so this is indeed a weird state of affairs, but GSM carrier equipment is still being manufactured for this exact reason.

No such plans in Russia. No plans to deploy 5G either tho

No one is willing to supply 5G equipment to Russia due to the sanctions. The 4G networks are already degrading.

It's not because of that, it's primarily because the military won't give up the frequencies used for 5G elsewhere.

4,4 – 4,99 Ghz was allocated, but Rostelecom cannot even launch VoWIFI because of sanctions.

I guess the reason is the screen. It's 320x240, and 0.3M is 640x480 (VGA).the secondary screen is even lower resolution (160x120).

It does work very well for this screen resolution.

And what else would you do with this media given it's a feature phone?

> And what else would you do with this media given it's a feature phone?

Send it to someone? It probably supports MMS. Or transfer it to your computer over USB-C/bluetooth.

Target customer group doesn't know how to use a computer, for the most part.

VGA is not that bad for phone pictures. If you scale down a photo from decent camera to VGA, it can look fine. The problem is that for VGA cameras, the resolution is the smallest issue - colors, sharpness, dybamic range are likely tragic.

Yeah, people really don’t seem to understand that most kids currently in high school have only used a desktop computer to play PC games, if at all.

> VGA is not that bad for phone pictures

You're right. It is the terrible jpeg compression which destroys everything.

No, it's not the JPEG compression.

This is an example of an image from my daughter's VGA camera: https://imgur.com/oMNkrUm

The image has ~100 KB which is plenty for this resolution. But the input data from the sensor is awful because the sensor and the optics are awful.

Vodafone Germany already turned off MMS. Others will follow.

It was hurting profits.

Yeah, I figured the value prop for something like this would be a fantastic camera for IG preening or similar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com