Is absolutely no use whatsoever if you forget to bring it with you. I got a rather solid lesson in that last weekend.

Last Saturday night, I attended a WWE Smackdown! show here in Sydney. A quick disclaimer: I attended as a guest of Acer in their corporate box; Acer has naming rights to the arena and its own corporate box relatively high up. Yeah, I enjoy watching pro wrestling. It's the finest fake sport yet devised. Not what I'm discussing here, and I'll have that argument with you over a beer any time you like. You're buying.

Anyway, I took my slightly-breaking-down Canon 30D DSLR with me to get a few shots for the private album. At least, I took it as far as the entry turnstile where people were being checked for food, drink and as I discovered, cameras with removable lenses. They're a no-no, at least according to the rules of the WWE, who want to control all photography access to their events. I do get that if I was sitting in the photography pit, but from a tiered box seat all the way up the top of the arena? Not wanting to walk all the way back to the car, I took my chances with checking it in at the cloak room, which has probably never seen a cloak in its life, and headed back in.

Damn. Blast. Particularly blast, because my normal modus operandi is to chuck a point and shoot camera into my main camera bag, just in case I have some kind of catastrophic failure. Except, naturally, this time. The whole issue with "cameras with removable lenses" makes me wonder what (if anything) the door staff would do with a Micro Four Thirds camera, many of which I could slip into a pocket without them noticing, and then whack an enormous zoom onto at my leisure. The gratingly American disclaimer played over the speakers as I walked in tried to say that no photography would be allowed, but there was fat chance of that happening based on the number of camera flashes going off. I could say why camera flash in an area is usually a bad idea, but I'd be stepping too far into David's Produce territory there.

Instead, I'll detail what I did next. My good camera was close by, but it was in the cloak room, out of reach. So what I did was improvise with the gadgetry that I did have on me at the time.

In this case I was carrying two mobile phones. An iPhone 3GS, which is my regular communication phone, and a review iPhone 4. I've got to admit it felt a little odd bringing out the iPhone 4 in public, simply because I wasn't trying to show off. It's still new enough that there's a big posing element to it. I used the iPhone 4 not out of desire to pose, but because it's meant to have better low-light ability and optics than the 3GS. That much was true, but this was something of a baptism of fire for the poor thing. Even with "better" performance, the peculiarities of lighting and position meant that most shots blew exposure out horribly. The best I could manage was a quick panorama shot or two, and the best of those were taken during intermission when the house lights were up and the poor iPhone camera wasn't trying to adjust to a bath of light over the ring.

iPhone Zoom. It sucks.

So, I did the best I could, all the time cursing I hadn't packed that compact. They're not the greatest cameras, but I'd have a lot more fine tuning ability and a zoom that would actually work. Yes, IOS4 does bring camera zoom into play, but it's woefully awful; a physical iPhone Zoom lens I reviewed recently was much better, but predictably, it was also back on the test labs bench. Getting creative (and ever so slightly naughty according to that same American disclaimer) I captured a few brief seconds of video, simply because the iPhone's camera adjusted focus and balance levels dynamically that way. With post cropping of still images from my short seconds of video, I was able to get shots that were a little better and more dynamic.

Strictly speaking, this is breaking the rules...

But it's the best shot I've got to get the best shot I can get

Not great, but better than nothing. As if to prove that the best gadget ever is the one you're carrying, two rows down from me the Country Manager for AMD Australia/New Zealand, Brian Slattery was typing in a full show report, in real time... from an iPhone. Even if you're not into Pro Wrestling, just looking at the length of that column shows a level of dedication that few possess. Dedication and insanely fast tapping fingers, especially as he was frequently stopping to cheer.

For what it's worth, the iPhone 4's camera is OK for a mobile phone camera, which means it's still only vaguely adequate in any real camera sense. That much I learned on the spot, but what I'll keep with me are the lesser images, and the reminder that no matter how portable any given gadget gets, it's absolutely useless if it's sitting at home when I need it with me.