I went to the T-Mobile store in Watertower today, looking for the elusive Ericsson T610. They didn't have one in stock, which sort of sucked but probably saved me from recklessly spending a bunch of money I didn't really need to spend.

While I was browsing around the store, I was somewhat suprised by the number of stick-style phones that offer "camera attachments" that plug into the bottom of the phone. I don't really get the value-add on these things. To me, the great thing about combining cell phones with cameras is that you don't have to remember to take your camera with you anymore. Assuming that you're already habituated to taking your phone with you everywhere you go, you'll always have a camera with you if your camera's in your phone.

Camera attachments totally defeat this. They're small, which means that I'm almost certainly going to lose the attachment at some point. Plus, they're almost universally oddly shaped, which makes the overall form factor of the phone+camera attachment really unappealing. This means that I'm probably not going to keep it attached to my phone most of the time - and probably not carry it with me. This seems to defeat the whole idea behind combining a camera with a cell phone.

I think camera attachments are an example of gratuitous "me-tooism" on behalf of the cell phone manufacturers. Either come up with a solid integrated camera solution (a la the T610) or get rid of camera support entirely and make the phones cheaper.