Submitted by Igor Faletski on February 4, 2007 - 2:17am.
Our portable devices can do a lot. Play music, take pictures, even make voice calls! Moreover, at this point they can even do it fairly well - mp3s sound crisp and one can carry lots of them, pictures are sharp and videos near DVD quality. When purchasing a new gadget, we often consider what it can do - but more often than not, end up not fully using its capabilities. Usability issues aside, a huge factor is often not considered - the quality of software that brings together the pieces of the puzzle known as "digital media".
Consider my D900. It takes decent pictures in bright environments, but getting them to the computer is anything but trivial. Find them on the phone (photos can only be saved on its internal flash memory), copy them to the memory card (painfully slow), insert the card into the PC card reader, import into Picasa. Sounds complicated? How about this - every time I move the pictures off the device, it starts counting them at "1". Eventually, multiple pictures with duplicate names are produced, causing even more confusion. Often I don't even want to create pictures because of how much work is involved in using them (and we're not even putting them on the web yet, just copying to the computer)!
