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Cheap Cell Phone Cameras

Posted by michael on from the bond-james-bond dept.

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.

3 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Are these really useful? by Nomad7674 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I think someone has to ask if these kinds of applications are really useful for cell phones in the first place. Right now, it seems like companies are scrambling to bring together all kinds of disparate technology so that their "ComboTech" can each be the NEXT BIG THING. Putting a camera onto a PDA makes a certain amount of sense - PDAs are meant to hang with you and let you record things on the go. But phones? Picturephones have been around for a while (for an interesting view of them, check out the movie MOTHER by Albert Brooks) and have never caught on.

    While some of the lack has to be due to the low picture quality, some of it is simply due to the fact that phones are NOT A VISUAL MEDIUM. A person using a phone is doing so to communicate verbally, not with body langugae. Until a new form factor emerges for visual communication (I like the communicators in EARTH: FINAL CONFLICT) I think this kind of work is a dead end.

    1. Re:Are these really useful? by atamar · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's not yourself speaking you want to visualize - it's your environment. I personally think that transmitting a photo of your beach vacation is silly, but on-the-fly image recognition, OCR, and translation services could actually have something in them. The phone-camera combination is your light-weight client, and the hard processing is done remotely, probably as a pay service.

      I personally wouldn't mind having a huge, convenient visual dictionary available. Point, shoot, wait, and read:

      "The Sydney opera house, built in blah blah, Press 'more' for further information."

      "The object you are looking at is a Bengalese tiger. Run."

      Come to think of it - Google, need a project manager for this? ;)

  2. timing is key by eracerblue · · Score: 2, Insightful

    if you read the article you might actually notice this:

    This device is expected to be ready in two years.

    So, in other words, by the time this thing gets released, it will be obsolete.
    The company may as well file for bankruptcy right now.