I couldn't agree with this more. My small child received a compact camera as a gift. While it was a decent camera for a kid, she was very frustrated with how small the screen was and how non-intuitive it was to her compared to a smartphone. I too was very frustrated with it as it was slow, configuring the software on it was a massive pain and the process of quickly getting photos from the camera to a computer was laughable. So, what did I do? I put the camera on a shelf and bought my daughter an older smartphone. I proceeded to lock it down and remove everything I could with the exception of the camera and gallery app. My daughter is now happier than ever and taking non-stop pictures. She can also almost instantly see those pictures on a computer now too!
Thanks for the hint. I was just about to buy an old compact camera for my daughter as she sees me taking pictures with my sony a7. Maybe you are right compact cameras are awful usability.
What software did you use to lock it down? I have some older iPhones laying around.
The iOS built-in Parental Controls settings can be used to enable/disable access on an app-by-app basis; that's probably all that's needed here, since Camera + Photos by themselves don't give you any built-in web browsers. (Camera.app can scan QR codes, but it just pops a new tab in Safari when you click them, and Parental Controls would block that.)
In contrast, my daughter sees us use our phones and uses them as well. I simply uninstalled all the apps I could and used the Google Family link stuff to lock it down further.
You can get really creative with an Android phone. Install LineageOS with only the minimum gapps you want. Lock down everything, remove the play store, add Tasker to make the UI black&white when using apps other than photos/camera install a launcher like nova to further customize what apps are visible/easily accessible. You can even completely remove Chrome but still install the web browser component so things like your e-mail app work but you can't easily browse the web.
I did this for a while a couple years back to discourage myself from spending so much time on my phone. Worked great and I would have kept it up if it were not for my wife constantly complaining that I couldn't look anything up or use Yelp or Messenger or... :D
Before there were smartphones it was universal that anything other than a PC had a cheaper CPU but it was maybe 1/3 the price for 1/30 the performance. That is, off-brand CPUs of all kinds were a terrible bargain.
Then smartphones came along and there was another commodity platform that gave good price-performance. Around that time Intel also got interested in making low-performance parts with low sticker prices but that were highly uneconomical if performance or user experience mattered.
