I’m sure this is a very grand advance in miniaturization, but I’m afraid the results may be questionable. Omnivision has announced a new sensor for mobile phone cameras that will take 14MP photos and do 1080p video at 60FPS. As far as I’m concerned, this is bad news. Cameraphone lenses are slow and of very low quality, and the tiny sensor size means both bad low light performance and bad clarity due to insanely small pixel pitch.

And the video will have to be low bitrate to accommodate the lack of storage on most phones. 1080p video at 1Mbps? It’ll be like watching an HDTV smeared with vaseline.

Our Friday lists are all about gadgety fun and leisure, but sometimes technology can be frustrating—and there is definitely a right way and a wrong way to handle it. This is definitely the wrong way.

If you have a problem with you TV, like a certain 70-year old Missouri man did with his converter box during the DTV transition, DO NOT get loaded, shoot it and engage in a standoff with the police. [Link]
If you work in a tech-related retail store, DO NOT do what 29 year old Aaron Seiber did and stab yourself so you don’t have to go. Making up a phony story about a skinhead attack to the police doesn’t help matters either. [Link]
If you have trouble getting up the stairs, escalators are a real lifesaver. However, DO NOT use one like the man in this video.
If your phone dies, DO NOT take it to get fixed and threaten to shoot it in the store with the 9mm concealed in your jacket. There are no cellphones in prison—unless you have a really good hiding place (and there is only one really good hiding place). [Link]
If you have a tall hedge, and no gadget designed to trim it, DO NOT raise your ride-on mower up with a crane to do the job like this lunatic from New Zealand. [Link]
So you have bought a new phone and you are not sure what to do with your old one. Unless is is complete garbage, DO NOT smash it. Get some money for it or donate it to charity. If you want an iPhone to smash, there are cheaper ways to do it. [Link]
If your kid acts up in a Verizon store, DO NOT drag him around on the floor with a leash. Someone with a cameraphone is bound to make a video of the whole incident and share it with the police.
If your internet connection goes down while playing an online game, DO NOT vent your frustrations by grabbing a knife and stabbing the first 15-year old girl that walks down the street near your home. You could wind up in a mental hospital with pending manslaughter charges. [Link]

The Samsung PL series is all about making digital photography fun, easy and fairly cheap, and what the Korean tech overlord has done today is to add on a little functionality to that list.

PL70 The PL70 comes with a 12.2-megapixel sensor, capturing stills and 720p HD video through a wide-angle 28mm lens with 5x optical zoom and displaying them for your pleasure on the 3-inch, 230K colour, LCD screen on the back. It measures 95.8mm × 59.5mm × 23.9mm, comes in black, silver, red or pink and gives you 11 scene modes to play with as well as an intelligent auto mode that will make the choice for you. Naturally, there’s image stabilisation, whether you’re in optical or digital zoom modes, and it comes with all the usual beauty shot, smile shot, face detection, blink detection and self portrait modes that most good compacts have these days to help you get the results you’re after. A very reasonable £199 from August. PL55 Essentially the same beast as its bigger brother here but no HD video shooting mode. You can still capture moving footage but only in 640 x 480 MPEGS rather than the H.264 encoding on the PL70.

That brings the price down to £149 but you also switch to a standard, non-wide, 35mm lens and a smaller 2.7-inch LCD and I’m not sure that’s worth the saving. However, if you are on a budget, you can pick up this 97mm x 59mm x 24.5mm model in either black, silver, red or blue from next month. ES17

The baby of today’s three is the £89 Samsung ES17. Just face detection and beauty shot to play with but a reasonable enough 12.2-megapixel sensor and 3x optical zoom. There’s still image stabilisation, not that you’ll really need it at that magnification, and although you’ll get more functionality on a cameraphone these days, they ES17 will probably still give you a better picture. You get what you pay for. Samsung