Smartphones - What's the point?

Smart phones, are quite smart. Not as smart as we'd like to think. Phone calls seem to be harder and harder to achieve they are completely useless in bad weather, the batteries don't last that long and if you don't turn the bloody thing off, it constantly harrangs you into be some sort of cyber socialite. All this negativity however is not what I'm about, It's fair to say that the smart phone has revolutionised photography as much polaroid did back in the sixties and seventies. Facebook and twitter are just choc-a-bloc with instagram photos of drunk folk and let's be honest they are far better than the previous incarnation of party photos, where most people did just look ugly and drunk. Where as now, swamped in effects and digital tom foolery people look slightly more palatable. Some folk take a more creative approach to using their camera phone and in some cases the results are pretty nice. This is good if slightly irritating.A photo is not about the equipment used to capture it or the amount of processing required to achieve the finished image. It is all about the picture is it not?These pictures I've put up were taken on a 5mp HTC. The photos without filtering are flat lifeless and of poor quality however using a nice we app called vignette you can get a pretty decent result out of it. I quite like these, it took me a long time to come to terms with that but I actually do. Polaroids always had a sort of lo-fi vibe about them that was there main appeal and still is. Phones mark a second revolution in popular photography like it or not. You may not like these pictures, you might think they are just more populist un-fettered, poorly refined crap and in all reality I still have a bind in my mind about them, they are a bit shit but that is exactly what's good about them. The fact is these little devices have generated a massive interest in imagery that simply wasn't so prominent 5 years ago. This can only be good for photographers, artists and designers. The general populous benefit to and people get to have a wee taste of creativity in the process, this can only be good can it not? Pity the things are so bad at making phone calls eh?