iPhone reaching tops on Flickr

August 18th, 2009

It’s safe to assume, that Flickr is a service that might serve as a source of statistics of most popular cameras out there. In spite of photographers and social web freaks being a huge part of its community, regular people upload their pics too. That’s why iPhone camera rocking statistics might be a surprise.

Almost always Canon’s EOS 400D was the most popular device – cool DSLR that provides unbelievable effects. Then what made iPhone so popular? Why is it reaching out for the first place?

Because Apple tried a different approach

Every single phone with camera I ever owned was simply unusable because of the way you could access it. Okay, just running this thing is simple, so is shooting pics (far from iPhone’s simplicity, though), but ways of accessing those? Come on.

Dad’s Nokia 6300 is making great photos – not gonna underestimate this one, because camera is really good. But let’s say I took a pic – what next? On iPhone, I simply click this little icon on bottom left and do whatever I want with my picture.

How does it look on Nokia OS-based device? Options, go to gallery, find your way through most confusing trees of catalogs ever seen, and… there is your pic. Makes you never want to use this feature again.

Also, Nokia 6300 is not Symbian OS device – it’s just at front simple-looking Nokia’s OS, that as it turns out is just as big pain in the ass as Symbian.

Because of constant Internet connection

iPhone vs. other mobile phones. Not really a hard fight.

Again, Wi-Fi on iPhone is the most amazing execution of this feature in mobile phone I’ve ever seen. In Symbian OS, I had to connect to network every time manually and it couldn’t even work with every application. What’s even the point of having that kind of connection on your phone? People simply couldn’t upload their pics to Flickr. Now it’s easy, you get one app, select photos and upload them. Nothing more simple.

And it’s not like you even need Wi-Fi – iPhone can make decent use of your EDGE/3G connection, too (not on my freakishly expensive plan, though).

This experience just feels right.

Because of the users

Users of Apple’s phone are definitely more into social networking than other phones’. They make use of Internet’s goodness, share their stuff more often and generally, are into that kind of things.
Even is someone is not really into that, buying an iPhone is a great way to start.

A tiny device beated up every DSLR and every point’n’shoot camera we’ve seen. That’s another major breakthrough for iPhone. Building a camera function into phone that doesn’t feel like a useless crap.
Even though quality of it is not far from other phones’, this one feels better – ability to take off camera out of your pocket whenever you want and just take a picture in a pleasant way.