News - Sony wireless 'lens camera' smartphone lens add-on revealed

[kalniel]

Surely that means the image sensor in in the lens to which I would have to buy a new swnsor how different focal lengths.

There are such things as zoom lenses you know

[Percy1983]

There are such things as zoom lenses you know

I am very much aware of this but for a lens to go from 25mm-500mm it will need to be rather compromised or be on a rather small sensor and therefore compromised.

I suppose it does come down to cost.

[crossy]

Also, as it's wireless, that would mean one requires tethering for Wifi right? Signal isn't the best in some areas unfortunately - especially for some more scenic locations.

If I had to guess I'd suggest it's probably using WiFi Direct. So there won't be any problems signal strength irrespective of where you are. So you might not be able to make a phone call, but at least you'll be able to transfer your pictures.

But then again, it does support NFC too but I've no experience of NFC and don't know much about it so I can only hope that NFC works well enough. I wonder how much data is sent between the two devices, would bluetooth not be good enough for it? I'm pretty sure there are more devices with bluetooth than NFC.

I've done a couple of transfers with NFC and it seems to work fine. You've got a point though, NFC isn't exactly a speed daemon, certainly a lot slower than regular Bluetooth. I can only assume that Sony valued the ease-of-use and low power requirements of NFC higher. And yes, before anyone picks me up on that last one, I know BT4.0LP has similar power usage to NFC.

Interesting side point though, iPhones don't have NFC nor WiFi Direct, so how are they supposed to connect? Although I've seen a couple of posts on the Apple support forums that suggest the current iPhone only lacks OS support and that's due in iOS7 as "AirDrop" (stupid Apple, why can't they call it WiFi Direct like everyone else).