14 DAY TRIAL // When we saw the words “android camera,” we immediately thought of a leak we spotted back nearer to the start of the month (August 2012), and our intuition is paying off for once.
For those who don't remember, it was rumored that Nikon would launch a product called Coolpix S800 or S800c on August 22.
That's tomorrow, so, naturally, Nikon Rumors has lived up to its reputation as long-time spoiler of the company's announcement plans.
It turns out that both the names mentioned above are probably true. Nikon will ship two versions of the camera, as visible in the photo.
From the front, the Coolpix looks like any other digital camera, but the back resembles smartphones quite a lot, due to the display that covers it almost entirely.
Speaking of which, the 3.5-inch OLED panel shows the home screen of the Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, with app icons for the camera, music playback, e-mail, browser, etc.
And thus, we arrive at the one hardware capability that most small form factor photo and video capture devices do not have by default: wireless Internet.
Nikon's Coolpix Android camera will possess Wi-Fi support, without which there would be no point in having e-mail and browser apps.
Naturally, the web link will be usable for posting pictures on social networking sites as well, among other things.
All in all, everything seems to be leading towards a strong, or at least satisfactory, start for cameras running the Android operating system, even if it is a version of the OS several generations behind the best one of today (Android 4.1 Jelly Bean).
Then again, everything from Android 3.0 Honeycomb onwards was made for tablets and doesn't bring anything new to phones and phone-sized gadgets anyway. With that in mind, Android 2.3 Gingerbread is just right for cameras and we wouldn't be surprised if developers come up with a camera-centric iteration of it at some point.
