At last month’s huge U2 show at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., how could you tell the difference between the professional photographers and your average amateurs?

Answer: the professionals were the ones whisked away after Bono and friends finished their third song, and the amateurs were still there, happily shooting to their heart’s content.

Nearly every person at any show these days is going to have some form of camera with them, be it a point-and-shoot, an iPhone or some other camera phone, and it seems that there is almost no way to imagine keeping all those devices out.

That new reality is forcing an increasing number of bands to come to grips with the fact that they can’t really control the images from their shows, and that, for the most part, they’re better off letting fans cram Facebook and Flickr with such pictures anyway.

“It’s an acknowledgment of the way technology is changing, and how much digital cameras have become a part of our lives,” Rob Sheridan, the creative director for Nine Inch Nails, told CNET News. “Now that everyone has video and still cameras in their phones, and pocket digital cameras take HD video and great quality pictures, not only is it impossible to keep cameras out of shows, but it’s fighting an increasingly uphill battle against what is now a cultural norm: people freely documenting their lives and the things they do to share it with friends and family.”

In fact, the only people who may emerge frustrated from this new paradigm are the professionals. For those shooting with credentials, the phrase is “three songs and you’re gone,” said Bob Carey, the president of the National Press Photographers Association, meaning that pros are generally allowed to shoot from a designated “pit” near the stage during a band’s first three songs, and then they have to leave.

Last month, I was one of those sporting a photo pass at the 96,000-fan U2 Rose Bowl show. And even as I was clicking away during those first three songs, I was acutely aware that there were hundreds of people even closer to the stage than I was, toting cameras capable of taking some pretty great pictures. Indeed, a quick Flickr search confirmed just that.

Little dynamos
Many of those fans–and thousands more throughout the Rose Bowl that night–were shooting with nothing more than a camera phone. And no one worries about the dissemination of images taken with devices like that. But some people were shooting with cameras like Canon’s new PowerShot G11, a little 12.5-ounce, 10-megapixel dynamo much more than capable of producing professional images.

So, while the professionals are being ushered out after those three songs, how is it that the fans are able to keep shooting?

The answer is camera policies in effect at concerts, which are almost always defined by the bands themselves. And conversations with people throughout the music industry make it clear that while there are no standard policies, and that the rules run the gamut from “anything goes” to “no pictures, please,” artists today are increasingly tolerant, even encouraging, of fans taking all the pictures they want.

Look, for example, at the Nine Inch Nails Web site, which spells out the band’s open camera policy, “inviting fans to capture the events with anything from a cell phone to a hi-def video camera.” The reason is clear: “The results have been overwhelming, filling our own galleries with thousands of images and videos from every show, and inspiring a number of ambitious fan-sourced video projects within the NIN community. Some of those projects are starting to surface now, and we couldn’t be happier with the way the fans have organized themselves and created some truly impressive work.”

Further, Sheridan told CNET News, even the proliferation of pictures of the band’s shows taken by fans hasn’t hurt its commercial interests.

“Despite the fact that our fans take thousands and thousands of their own photos at each NIN show with whatever camera they’d like, we still sell prints of live photos taken by me through a Web site called frcphotos.com,” said Sheridan. “This is presumably the type of thing that other acts would be trying to ‘protect’ by limiting photography at shows, but we’ve found that fans are still eager to purchase reasonably-priced professional prints, often taken at angles or distances that only someone working for the band would have access to.”

Some artists are clearly concerned about fans’ rights to take pictures, and go so far as to issue reminders when there are restrictions. For example, the indie rock due, Tegan and Sara, have sent tweets saying things like, “Hollywood Bowl restricts cameras that are deemed professional. This usually means cameras with a removable lens. So keep that in mind!!!” And, of course, other rock stars are not at all behind the notion of fans taking pictures. Among those are said to be Prince, Kanye West, Bjork, and others. At shows by those artists, security is known to assiduously stop people from taking pictures of any kind, even with camera phones, though one wonders just how effective such policies can be.

Less anti-camera attitudes
But clearly, anti-camera attitudes are becoming less and less prevalent these days.

“It’s something that artists have come to realize they have no control over,” said Abe Baruck, a manager who works with big-name acts like Journey, Clint Black, and Peter Wolf. It’s “more a realization that this is just the way people enjoy entertainment. They want to capture something for their own nostalgia (and it) just doesn’t go anywhere other than for their own use.”

That thinking is likely what is behind the restrictions on specific kinds of camera equipment at some shows, like U2’s, and on professionals. Even though millions of amateur photographers now own digital SLRs, there is still a mindset in the entertainment industry that anyone toting one at a concert is a professional and therefore should be limited in where and how they shoot.

That’s why some bands, like U2, make a point of allowing fans to take pictures, so long as they stick to lower-end equipment. “Since 2001, U2 has openly allowed fans to bring cameras to their shows,” reads the FAQ on the site U2tours.com. “Your camera, however, must be a point-and-shoot camera; DSLRs are not allowed.”

“It’s just a very simple calling card saying, ‘I’m a professional media person,’” Philip Blaine, a producer with Coachella promoter Goldenvoice, said of photographers with digital SLRs, “‘and I know how to utilize this media in a professional manner.’”

And while it’s generally bands that are setting camera policies, some venues have also asserted control over what fans can and can’t bring.

One example is the Hollywood Bowl, in Los Angeles. As evidenced by the tweet from Tegan and Sara, that venue imposes restrictions around certain kinds of equipment. A Hollywood Bowl spokeswoman said that that venue won’t let ticket-holders bring in professional-grade equipment.

Professional sports seem to largely work the same way. According to NFL spokesperson Brian McCarthy, football fans are allowed to bring in any kind of still camera–though lenses are restricted to less than six inches long, for security reasons–they want. That policy is standard across the entire NFL, McCarthy added, and prohibits fans from bringing in any kind of camcorder.

The same basic policy applies to other sports, too. According to Nick Ohayre, a spokesperson for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, fans are free to carry and use cameras at basketball games, so long as they don’t use flash and don’t bring large, professional equipment.

But over time, as the technology improves, it may become more common and force sports leagues and entertainers to pay more attention to what’s happening with imagery taken by the thousands of small devices fans bring with them to events, especially as the quality of pictures from those devices is often good enough for professional publication and licensing.

Some even think that band representatives need to do a better job of keeping up with what’s possible in technology.

“I don’t think they’re aware of some of (what’s possible) with new devices,” said Carey of the National Press Photographers Association. “I don’t think they’ve figured out the nuances of what point-and-shoots can do with photos and video.”

But the increasing permissive attitude toward letting fans shoot whatever photos they please may simply come down to the realities of what it would take to do a serious search of every one of the thousands of people who go through an event’s gates.

In the old days, said New York freelancer Lia Bulaong, if she wanted to sneak a camera into a show, she would hide its battery in her bra and then convince security she had brought her powerless camera into the show in order not to risk it being stolen from her car.

But in the last two or three years, she said, such subterfuge is pointless.

“No-camera policies just became extra ridiculous because pretty much everyone has a camera in their phone,” Bulaong said. “Venues can’t turn away camera phones and will never the capacity to check them in like they do coats and bags.”

Plus, she pointed out, more and more, the bands want to incorporate the fans’ phones into their shows.

“The one thing you will see at every concert now, regardless of the artist, is the moment when everyone has their camera phone out and the venue is awash in tiny lit up screens.”

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With battery technology the biggest barrier to the proliferation of electric vehicles, companies like electric sports-car maker Tesla are constantly surveying their battery options. At the Clean Tech Investor Summit in Palm Springs, Calif., Tesla Chairman Elon Musk said the company is moving its battery-pack production from Thailand to California, and wants to one day buy battery cells produced domestically as well–potentially even getting into the battery cell business themselves.

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Having seen Apple’s MacBook Air notebook computer up close, I’m as dazzled as everyone else who’s had a chance to examine this delicious piece of industrial design.

Dazzled doesn’t translate to handing over a credit card, however–at least not yet, and not solely because it’s almost never a good idea to buy Apple’s (or anyone else’s) hardware immediately after its initial release.

Even if serious flaws didn’t frequently surface in the company’s first batch of new models, I’d hold off on buying one of these, despite my admiration for the genuine accomplishments in this one. Cost isn’t the issue; rather, there are just a few too many feature compromises for my work-style.

My friend and your co-host here, Walt Mossberg, explained them well in his recent review. They include a nonremovable battery; non-expandable RAM; a paucity of ports; lack of an on-board optical drive; and a relatively small 80GB hard disk. (I wouldn’t even consider the flash-memory model for the moment, due to its high price and lower 64GB capacity.)

The somewhat modest central-processing power is a non-issue. Intel’s new Merom-architecture chip, running at up to 1.8GHz, has plenty of muscle for the kinds of duties a machine like this would typically handle. Graphics and media professionals would disagree, no doubt, but this ultra-svelte device isn’t aimed at them in any case.

I certainly can imagine why some folks have already ordered one. A frequent traveler whose computing tasks include little more than email, document-handling, Web browsing and watching a video will have lots to love.

But if she’s one of the increasingly global members of the workforce, and (unlike Steve Jobs) flies coach internationally except when she’s lucky enough to get an upgrade, she’ll discover that the roughly 5-hour battery life is good enough for domestic travel. And if the battery gets flaky or fails on the road, as has happened to me in two laptops, one an Apple, she’ll be up a creek.

Laptop batteries wear down eventually. Apple says it’ll replace batteries for the same price as MacBook batteries, with no labor charge, but there’s a serious inconvenience factor in having to take or send the machine to a repair shop.

Our otherwise happy purchaser will encounter other problems. She’ll arrive at her hotel one day and discover that there’s no Wi-Fi in the room. Out will come a dongle that fits into the single USB port, which is contained in such a tiny space that lots of USB devices will need extender cables, allowing her to use the room’s wired Ethernet connection.

In fact, it’s already clear that anyone doing serious computing will be hauling around a slew of dongles for the MacBook Air. The adapter for video presentations is a fact of life already for Mac notebook users. You’ll need a small USB hub just for starters, plus various adapters for things like an EVDO or other high-speed cellular modems that many serious travelers now rely on for domestic connections.

Apple’s design choices were surely aimed at one goal: creating the thinnest, lightest and most beautiful notebook around. You can find lighter Windows machines, but they have even more compromises, often including dreadful keyboards. (Not that I’m a fan of the Chiclet-y keyboards Apple now includes with everything but the MacBook Pro; some folks love them but I’m distinctly underwhelmed.)

The best keyboards on any notebook computers are in the ThinkPads from Lenovo, which bought the line from IBM a while back and, so far, appears to have maintained high standards. The smaller ThinkPads, especially the X models, are sturdy, reliable, capable and smartly designed in their own right, though not remotely jaw-dropping like the new Macs. But the ThinkPads have been the absolute class of notebook computers for many years.

Which leads to the obvious point–something I and at least a few other people have been publicly advocating for a long time, not that Apple is paying any attention. We keep wishing that Apple would either make a deal with Lenovo to sell ThinkPads with Mac OS X as an option, or make a deal with whatever company actually manufactures the ThinkPads. Then we’d enjoy the best of both worlds. (An upcoming ultra-portable, ultra-capable ThinkPad model would be the perfect machine for the Mac OS.) I would pay a premium, and so would plenty of other folks.

Some day, I predict, Apple will make such a deal. While we wait for Steve Jobs or his successor to realize why it’s a good idea, we can expect a host of improvements to upcoming versions of the MacBook Air. Not incidentally, some of these will also make Apple even more money.

Keep in mind that the relentless pace of technological improvement means that the processing power, memory and storage capacity of the MacBook Air will get dramatically better in coming months and years in any case. So that 80GB drive will be 160GB next year, and the 64GB in the solid-state version will double, too, for the same cost. As always, customer patience solves some issues.

But if I were czar of the MacBook line, I’d do two things right away. First, I’d find a way to make the current model modular, with one additional port that would connect to a dock in the home or office or both; the dock would in turn connect to a monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, Ethernet line, external storage and other typical gear. This would resurrect the still-classic mode of the old Mac Duo notebook systems, which even now are fondly remembered as the best hardware combination of Apple’s portable-machine history. (Of course, the PC-laptop world–and, yes, the ThinkPads–have been doing this for a long time.) The docks would, like other Apple-made peripherals, become a profit center in their own right.

Second, I’d launch another notebook model. Call it the MacBook Air Pro. It would weigh a half-pound more than this one, and it wouldn’t be quite as gorgeous. But it would add back ports such as Ethernet and Firewire, along with a more capacious hard disk, removable battery, MacBook Pro keyboard, built-in EVDO and expandable RAM, among other things.

Meanwhile I’ll count on all you early adopters to find the inevitable bugs in the first batch of MacBook Airs. And I’ll count on Apple, as always, to be a pace-setter in design.

But I suspect I’m in a large class of potential customers. I’d love a computer that’s high art, but I need one that’s right for hard work.

Very often, in the excitement accompanying a new technology, there is some sort of “elephant in the room” that everyone convinces themselves is not really there. In the heady, early days of the World Wide Web, for example, investors in particular seemed to ignore the need for profit in the business models of so many of the Internet IPOs.

At the recent D5 conference, I could feel a familiar, collective excitement in the air as speaker after speaker described in glowing terms the opportunities for delivering more and more media content to our mobile devices. Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, for example, told us that “mobile was one of their key platforms,” and that they were now specifically designing TV shows, such as “Lil’ Bush,” for the mobile platform.

During the conference, representatives of Google, Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, and Facebook, among others, indicated that they were specifically redesigning their services for user-friendliness on our handheld devices. Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google, dubbed the coming trend “SMS gone wild”–people sending and sharing all kinds of stuff from phone to phone. And the platform vendors–Apple, Samsung, Sony, Palm and others–described some of their plans for the next generation of devices on which we will consume this new content. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, even predicted that the mobile phone could perhaps become the home PC for lower-income households. Heady stuff, indeed.

So, as one of the few “energy” executives in the room, I kept waiting to hear how these new applications and devices would be impacted by–and planned to circumvent–what some insiders are calling the “run-time gap.” The run-time gap describes the difference in demand for power and energy in mobile devices, and the ability of battery technology to deliver it. The demands for “portable power” are skyrocketing–thanks to the technologies and markets we heard about at D–but battery improvements are comparatively flatline. The difference in the two growth curves, graphically, gives us an ever-widening gap. I wondered: Would “Lil’ Bush” have to be edited to 15-minute episodes so that the credits could roll before the battery rolled over?

At first, I thought it was just the old elephant in the room–the secret problem with mobile multimedia that nobody wanted to talk about. But then it became increasingly clear to me: The run-time gap was not an issue in that audience–and perhaps in most other audiences–because nobody even seemed to be aware of it. It was, instead, an elephant not in the room.

When the questions didn’t come, and I couldn’t stand the suspense any longer, I finally raised a hand myself and posed the power question directly to Apple CEO Steve Jobs: How are you going to deal with the power demands? With the iPod and video iPod behind him, and the multimedia iPhone then ahead, he, at least, should be concerned. And he was; he said, essentially, that “power is the No. 1 issue with portable devices.” Think about that. From Steve Jobs’s mouth to your ears–at least metaphorically. “Power is the No. 1 issue with portable devices.”

Now, I have a vested interest in the issue because my company builds a sophisticated plastic membrane that makes tiny, mobile-oriented fuel cells possible. We happen to believe that mobile devices should have continuous and uninterruptible power that can be replenished by inserting a small fuel cartridge, small enough to be carried in a pocket or purse–an ideal solution for power-hungry, multimedia portable devices and the flood of new content coming our way.

After many years of development, the technology is now on the verge of packing more energy than batteries, more safely, in less space and weight. But whether or not you share our vision, if you have a vested interest in mobile devices, mobile applications and mobile content delivery, you cannot ignore the power issues. It does nobody any good to be able to watch the latest episode of “CSI” on their favorite mobile device if the screen goes dark before we’ve found out whodunit.

Apple’s new iPhone may well be a revolutionary product in some ways. But after testing one of the devices that went on sale late last month, I’m steering clear, at least for now, of the most shamelessly overhyped consumer product since Windows 95.

For all its admirable features–the large screen, gorgeous industrial design and advanced user interface in particular–the iPhone feels like a beta product. It’s still early in development and suffers from deal-breaker drawbacks.

The worst is the overall control-freakery from Apple, the manufacturer, and its telecom partner, AT&T. You want choice? Not a chance.

Consumer Reports notes that AT&T is one of the least-favored U.S. mobile carriers, for network quality and customer satisfaction. Worse, the company’s low-speed digital network is inadequate for a device that boasts of being Internet-native, and the Wi-Fi capabilities don’t make up for that lapse. (And never mind AT&T’s recent decision to become Hollywood’s accomplice in tracking customers’ Internet activities, not to mention its Big-Brotherish coziness with government snoops.)

I’m a frequent traveler outside the U.S., and this phone doesn’t cut it for serious international use. If I want to make GSM calls, I’m stuck with AT&T’s roaming rates; with my current phone I can swap SIM cards to use another carrier’s cheaper local service if I don’t like the international roaming rates from T-Mobile, my current carrier.

Apple can’t fix AT&T. But the device itself, however alluring, needs upgrades. For example, on the international roaming front, the iPhone provides no access to other carriers’ 3G networks, which means the phone won’t work at all in places like Korea, where my 3G-equipped GSM phone works fine.

The onscreen keyboard isn’t bad if you’re “typing” in landscape mode in the Web browser, because the keypad in that mode is sufficiently large to help you avoid errors. But if you’re trying to create an SMS or email message in the phone’s portrait mode–it doesn’t adjust to the sideways view with those applications–be prepared for some frustration. I wasted lots of time backspacing over mistakes and retyping things, and the “predictive-text” feature didn’t predict my words with much accuracy.

The camera is adequate for some purposes, and that’s the best you can say about it. There’s no zoom, and no video recording mode.

An especially cheesy “feature” is a headphone jack that requires an adapter for many popular headsets (or some surgery on your current headphone plug). There’s no excuse for this.

Then there’s the nonremovable battery, which Apple says is designed for at least 400 charge cycles and an unspecified number of charges at up to 80% of battery capacity afterward. That will steer people–perhaps this is the idea–toward new phones. Meanwhile, Apple has found another way to make money on this design choice: It’ll sell a new battery for about $80 and keep your phone for a few days in the process.

Despite running a version of the OS X operating system, the iPhone is locked down in its software capabilities, which means that third-party software developers–and therefore customers–are mostly out of luck if they want the kind of applications that have made other smart phones so versatile. Apple’s claim that there’s enough flexibility in the Web browser for third-party development is beyond ludicrous; it’s downright insulting.

More lockdown: The iPhone is unusable in any capacity until it’s activated with the phone company. Want to use it just for Wi-Fi-based Web browsing, plus video and audio and note-taking? Forget it.

Still more: I can use my current phone as a modem with a PC or Mac, something I do on occasion when out of range of a broadband or wireless network. The iPhone doesn’t allow this. Why not? (To be fair, some phones are locked this way.)

No doubt, some of the iPhone’s current drawbacks will be resolved with software upgrades. Some problems can’t and won’t be fixed, at least not in the U.S. version, where AT&T will be the exclusive carrier for the next few years.

All that said, I do love the way the thing looks and feels–and in many respects, the way it works. If other phone-makers don’t adopt the iPhone’s best features (I assume they will), I’ll definitely consider getting one at some point.

But I’ll consider it only when Apple starts selling it in Europe or Asia with 3G capabilities; when I can install a SIM chip from the GSM/3G carrier of my choice; when the software is significantly upgraded; and when third parties can give me the features I want, as opposed to solely the ones Apple thinks are good for me.

That sounds like iPhone 2.0, at the earliest. For now, the initial product doesn’t come close to living up to the hype.