There are a lot of people who think camera’s in tablets are a bad idea. “Nobody should be allowed to take pictures with a large tablet in front of their face.”
But if you can think outside of the traditional camera box for a moment, and start to think what’s possible if you combine a really portable computer with a decent camera, you’ll soon see interesting new possibilities.
Just a couple examples:
Camscanner - turns your tablet or smartphone into a scanner. You take a picture of your notes using camscanner, it enhances the contrast and readability, and truns it into a pdf. Great tool if you still prefer to take notes with traditional pen and paper, but would like to store your notes digitally.
POP prototyping - turns your paper mockups into clickable digital mockups. You just draw your mockups on pen and paper, take some pictures, and add some interaction: what screen should be displayed when you press somewhere on your paper mockup?
Magicplan - Take a picture of all the corners of a room, and Magicplan automatically draws a map of the room. Magicplan also calculates the size of your room. Would be even nicer if you could integrate it with something like Google sketchup and create 3d models of your rooms. I bet there’s an app for that?
Puppetpals - Nice app to create animated stories. What makes it really nice is that you can take pictures of the people around you and quickly add them into your story.
DermoMap - Application to help diagnosing skin problems. It offers information on all sorts of skin diseases. Using the camera, a picture of a skin problem can be used in the application to compare it with available pictures.
There’s probably a lot more things you do with a computer that would benefit from direct access to a camera. It’s certainly a lot faster and easier than having to take a picture with another device and then getting the picture into the application where you need it.