Crippled for android development.

[Claghorn]

Just one example: The Camera API reports 3264x2448 as the largest available image size. That's 8 MP, and the native Nikon camera app can take 16 MP pictures (4608x3456), so Nikon only let's you get to half the camera. I could believe there might be a problem getting a 16 MP camera to work with the standard API (could make for some very large jpeg picture buffers to keep all in memory), but for gosh sakes Nikon, make a NikonCamera API available if you have to. You aren't going to get armies of android developers turning out apps that will make people want the camera if you cripple their ability to develop. (And I'm not really sure I want to spend months of my life reverse engineering the Nikon app .

 

[Mike Black1]

In addition to your resolution-issue I found the following problems after working with the camera for one day:

• WiFi Connection gets lost from time to time.
• You cannot charge the camera via your PC's usb and concurrently work with android. Instead the OS switches off while charging.
• You cannot switch the camera on while you are connected via usb. You have to disconnect before.
• There is no usb-driver to let you develop applications via eclipse/android sdk. So you have to copy the apk manually to the camera with each iteration.

Summary: Frustrating from the developer's point of view.

 

[Claghorn]

> WiFi Connection gets lost from time to time.

Yea, it likes to stop it when the screen blanks, or you sneeze, or anything else . One thing I found that helps is to change my router so it doesn't hide the SSID. It seems to have incredible difficulty reconnecting to a hidden SSID. The reconnection is quite fast when I went ahead and configured my router to broadcast the SSID.

> You cannot charge the camera via your PC's usb and concurrently work with android. Instead the OS switches off while charging.
> You cannot switch the camera on while you are connected via usb. You have to disconnect before.

Plus the battery drains really fast when it is on all the time while doing development. I bought one of these, which is clumsy, but seems to work well:

Amazon.com: Nikon 25784 EH-62F AC Adapter: Camera & Photo

> There is no usb-driver to let you develop applications via eclipse/android sdk. So you have to copy the apk manually to the camera with each iteration.

Linux works with the SDK and adb OK. I certainly haven't seen a windows driver though. Even on linux I had to fiddle around a bit to get it working with adb:

MyAndroidBook - Chapter 7

 

[Claghorn]

I just found the Samsung Galaxy Camera user manual showed up on the Samsung UK web site and on page 12 it explicitly states that the device can be used while it is charging, so that definitely puts Samsung one up on Nikon. It also looks like it uses a normal USB connector, not a weird custom cable like the Nikon has.