Why do tablets bother to have rear cameras?

If there is one thing I’ll never understand these days, it’s the fact of why tablet manufacturers these days bother to put in rear-facing cameras. Most of these cameras possess shitty sensors to begin with, most of these tablet cameras don’t have even a small LED flash function, and lastly why would you want to carry a 7″ or 10″ camera with you anyway? Chances are you probably possess a smart phone that has better camera functionality than your tablet will (I know my candy-bar phone even has better quality than the iPad’s rear camera, for instance). And yet, reviewers are faced with a conundrum: bash the camera and risk seeing it removed in a future iteration of a product, or laud the camera for just existing yet fooling people into thinking they can actually get away with good pictures while looking like a fool. Even with the best of cameras, such as that seen in the Xoom, see what Josh Topolsky says in one of his final reviews for Engadget on the Motorola Xoom

There’s no question that it’s nice to have a 5 megapixel camera and LED flash on the back of the Xoom, but we found little utility in actually having a decent shooter on a device of this size. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where you’re using the Xoom as your main camera. Besides looking ridiculous, it’s not all that convenient to handle something this large when you’re trying to snap away. Another issue is the sheer glare of the screen — shooting in daylight proved to be a challenge, and sometimes we couldn’t even see the display well enough to snap a photo.

That said, the rear camera produced relatively good looking photos — about the quality we’ve been seeing with the company’s Atrix 4G — though the interface in Honeycomb is about a million times better looking and more pleasant to use. Again, it is somewhat difficult to hold something of this size and take really steady shots, so we found the use of the Xoom as a camera almost completely impractical in most situations.

source: Engadget

Steve Jobs said it himself (or maybe it was Apple fanboys trying to defend the iPad): the idea of tablets is for media consumption, not necessarily media production. GarageBand on the iPad may be the sole exception, but I promise you that there’ll never be a time where we’re wielding 10″ cameras; it’s just silly. So why can’t we just get rid of the damn rear-camera (the front-facing camera, while still stupid if you’re holding the tablet and doing video chat at the same time, is at least more plausible), and put in something more worthwhile? like a microSD slot? Or heck, a USB port so we can actually VIEW our photos that we take on our NICER cameras and put them on a display that’s actually somewhat worthwhile?

Toshiba’s upcoming tablet looks promising because it promises both a full SDHC slot and then miniUSB and USB 2.0 connectors. Every other tablet provides some sort of expansion, albeit microSD (ASUS’s Transformer allows SD input when docked with the keyboard). (And we all know the iPad doesn’t have out-of-box support for any expansion. Tablet manufacturers need to realize that consumers really don’t want gimmicky stuff anymore…especially when we have seemingly better camera sensors on our phones these days, not to mention it’s easier to take pictures with phones than it’ll ever be for a tablet. Probably.