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.

Comments

Are these really useful?

[Nomad7674]

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.