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

Nokia 7650

[bebroll]

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

Really popular in Saudi Arabia

[night_flyer]

they use them to spy on women in changing rooms...

Real-time video

[Falrick]

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.

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.

Re:Are these really useful?

[cryptochrome]

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.

Other way around is much better

[magi]

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...

This is GREAT for shopping!!!

[gelfling]

'Ring ring'

'Hello?'

'It's me, I'm at the store, do you want ceiling fixtures that look like THIS?'

'Nah that's the wrong shape, find something octagonal'

'MMMk - ciao!'

Why this is useful

[Cato]

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.

Fer Cryin' Out Loud

[cryptochrome]

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?

Re:Fer Cryin' Out Loud

[st0rmshad0w]

uh...

1) Very rarely, if ever.

2) Yes, but a camera in my phone wouldn't be my first, or even second choice.

3) Uh, nope.

While its cool the tech sector and mad scientists everywhere are trying to put everything we'll ever use into one little box, I want them to get re-focused on the important stuff.

First off, figure out a way I can safely put metal in a microwave. And secondly, I want my flying car damnit! I mean, its 2002 for crying out loud. Where the hell are the flying cars!?

Blah, all in all, cute toy, but doomed I would think.

Most new Japanese phones have cameras already

[hqm]

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.

You are wrong because...

[horza]

... 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.