Slashdot Mirror
Cheap Cell Phone Cameras
prostoalex writes "Apparently an Israeli company figured out the way to put a 376x296 digital camera into cell phones for less than $15." We've done previous stories about a PDA/phone with included camera, but this could be integrated into a regular phone so that your conversation partner could get a nice real-time view of your ear.
Check this page where Nokia show their new 7650 - supposed to get to the European market at the end of the second quarter of 2002. This features a build in camera for sending images via MMS. I already tried it at the Cebit this year and it looks great ...
Cheers,
bebroll
.bbr
fear women playing with delete functions ...
next time it could be you .
they use them to spy on women in changing rooms...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The problem with real-time video isn't figuring out how to get a camera into the phone, its a question of bandwidth. Second generation (2G) phones only have about 14.4 Kbps available to them to share between voice and data using a single traffic channel. Newer systems, such as some 2.5G and 3G systems, have substantially more bandwidth available. 1X systems, a 3G extension, has quite a lot of bandwidth available and I have seen a demo of real-time streaming video on these phones. Very impressive stuff. The only problem is that for the most part, the high-bandwidth standards generally expect that you won't be moving, or moving very slowly, when you are using high-bandwidth applications.
One method of achieving the high-throughput is to allocate your call multiple traffic channels. One of the problems lies in handing off from cell to cell as you are moving down the highway. Getting the handoff scheduled, and perhaps even rerouting the data to the new cell, isn't really the problem. Its what to do if there just aren't enough traffic channels available to accomodate your usage on the next cell, or any cell that could service you.
Couple that with the fact that I think that most people are more interested in having higher cell-phone reliability than ooh-ah features, add in financially troubled providers, and I think that it will be quite a while before we actually see this in the US. Europe may be differnt as they seem to be lower on the curve of early adopters.
something clever
I think picture messaging (part of MMS [Multimedia Messaging Service] in GPRS networks) will be huge, and this camera chip will help it take off. If you can send a picture to anyone with an MMS mobile phone or an email account, you can send postcards to friends and 'how do I fix this' messages to suitable experts, and get 'top 5 goals' messages, photos from Internet personal ads, etc... The more people have a camera built into their phone, the more they will use it (though probably never as much as plain text SMS).
MMS phones are already available in Europe (Ericsson T68i, with Nokia 7650 soon) where MMS is just starting - in Japan, J-Phone has had a huge success with picture messaging, known as Sha-Mail (over 4 million picture messaging handsets sold). Watch this space...
Even if you don't have a mobile phone, you'll be able to send email with picture/sound/video attachments to anyone with an MMS phone.
What is the big news here? J-Phone in Japan
has been selling mobile phones with cameras for
the last two years now. DoCoMo now makes its own
line, and the J-Phones can now send short movies.
The US is way behind in mobile phone technology,
with a divided and hopelessly bug-ridden wireless data infrastructure, due to the greed and stupidity of the wireless carriers and the "WAP" idiocy.