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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.
what would be really nice would be if they could use those cameras to provide a wireless feed to a remote location in real time. But I don't think the bandwidth is quite there yet.
Picture a webcam that goes anywhere.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Cramming a small camera in a cell phone results only in useless crappy quality pictures. Not a good idea.
Putting a cell phone - or network connection - to digital cameras is a much nicer idea.
Yesterday, I purchased Sony TRV50E digital video camera that has Bluetooth connection. By chance, I happen to own a Nokia 6310i cell phone, which has Bluetooth and GPRS.
TRV50E has a built-in web browser and mail client in the camera and 3,5 inch touch-screen. I can now take 1300x1024 stills with the video camera, or 320x240 MPEG-2s, and write normal e-mails and attach the stills or video clips as email attachments, using the cell phone as a modem. It's also nice to surf the web using a "large" screen and a stylus, much nicer than with any WAP crap.
Rather nice web-pad...ehm...web-brick, eh?
Well, in theory; the video camera connects just fine with the cell phone, and makes a PPP connection, but the GPRS connection fails for some reason. I'm investigating the problem, but unfortunately these cameras and cell phones are not yet too common even here in Finland...
Everytime someone suggests putting a camera in mobile phone, there's always a bunch of people who assume that it would be used for videoconferencing purposes or high-rez photography, and whine about how useless it is. Get a clue. There are very good reasons to have even a low-rez camera in your phone, some of them more useful than having a phone/PDA combo. Consider the REAL uses:
1) How many times have you been somewhere where you REALLY wished you had a camera, but you didn't. How often did you have your mobile phone? (assuming you had one at all)
2) Have you ever been in a situation where you would have liked to quickly relay your situation to someone, i.e. you're witnessing a crime in progress, someone ran into your car and you'd like to keep a record of the situation, you need to describe a location to someone who's familiar with the area, etc.
3) Have you ever run out of storage on your camera, or wanted to send pictures or streaming video for live updates to something on the web?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
... speaking as a consumer I'm going to go out and get the first decent mobile with camera built in. It's going to be great to be able to whip it out at a bar or party when someone decides to make a fool of themselves :-) As for "A person using a phone is doing so to communicate verbally" that simply isn't true in Europe. My friends and I tend to split our usage 50/50 between voice and text messaging. I agree with the picture quality statement though, I want at least 640x480 so I can put the pics up on a web site.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Stop thinking about how people use technology today and think about how they could use it tomorrow, and how much it's actually worth.
Most people don't use PDAs, because most people don't NEED PDAs, certainly not enough to hook one on their belt. They're great for supergeeks and very busy people, but not for the general public. Most non-obstinate people would like to have a mobile phone though, and would like their mobile do stuff that's useful on the road (phone, messaging, address book, camera, and information services).
Side note - I don't like carrying a lot of stuff around. As far as I'm concerned, I should never have more than three things in my pants (no not THOSE you perv) - my keys, my wallet w/cards+money, and a pen. Possibly a phone small enough to fit in my pocket (nokia 8260 for instance). None of this belt clip shit for me, thanks. I don't carry stuff around because I think it might be useful - I carry stuff around that it sucks to be without when I need them. PDAs don't qualify, when the pen and a few slips of paper in my wallet do the job well enough.
Videophones never caught one because there's no point in sending a continuous video stream of your face (unless, of course, you're getting naked, and then it's pointed elsewhere). In fact 99% of the time you wouldn't even want to send video, for various reasons. But a mobile phone can be used anywhere and it would be great if it could take pics of the immediate area for purposes of analysis and communication. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?