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The Nokia 7650 Cell Phone w/ Integrated Camera
Unstrung writes "Nokia has just started shipping, in Europe, its first mobile phone with a digital camera onboard, unleashing on the unsuspecting continent a device with roughly the same mischief-making potential as the office photocopier - but in a package you can take to the bar on a Friday night." It's 640x480, and doesn't look clunky. In short, me want.
If you are looking for a really small camera, be sure to check the SMaL Ultra Pocket. It is the size of a credit card and 6mm thick.
You can find it as the "Fuji Eyeplate" or as the "Logitech Pocket Digital".
I've got mine and its really cool.
Fh
It probably won't be here soon, because the US doesn't really have GPRS or MMS ( MultiMedia Messaging System).
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Okay, call me naive, but there might actually be uses for this phone that aren't sick and/or twisted.
I mean, how often have I wanted to describe something to someone else, but just can't seem to get the right words? Assuming this is integrated well enough, just snap a picture and send it along... it's often not worth it to dig out the digital camera, snap a shot, hook it up to the PC, grab the pic, scale it, e-mail it, wait for the other person to get it, etc, etc...
The key of course, would be wide-spread acceptance of this technology, combined with some sort of open standard so that you can avoid a "Let me send this picture... oh you have a Nokia? I have a Sprint... darn..." problem.
check it out... http://www.infosync.no/news/2002/n/2016.html
a 3rd party company already hacked it to record video off the ccd..
look, this is the way all phones are going to be, due to MMS (multi media messaging) which allows you to send messages a "slide show" format, with pictures and music and text. shipping a MMS phone without a camera is just stupid, its like a car with no tires.
this is a GSM 900/1800 phone so it will only work in europe, and Nokia is VERY slow to make their GSM products use the 1900 band with NA uses.
the better alternative is the Sony Ericsson P800 wich is a world phone, and a camera and uses a newer version of the Symbian OS. Includes BlueTooth, and dang(Sony Memory Stick "Duo")
anywho, 7650=garbage P800=great
No word on how the software works, and what features are available for automatically uploading photos as you take them.
I'd like this to automatically beam photos to a server or to my mailbox, as I shoot them. Sort of like iphoto/idisk, but not requiring me to keep my photos on someone else's server. Just an easy way to batch download them later, so I don't have to carry around flash cards.
640x480 is a bummer though. This is too expensive for a "toy" camera, and too low-res to replace the Nikon digital camera I'd take on vacation.
Also with flash cards large enough to store hundreds of high-quality photos, and IP-over-cell-phone costing a zillion per KB, it's hard to see how this would ever be worth it without a revolution in cell phone pricing.
You'd think US vendors would wake up and smell the profits. If I could transmit small bits of data using a pocket device, and not have to pay a lot to do so, I'd use the service a lot. And most people would use it more than I would.
But instead, vendors are chasing UHF and Ham operators off the air to free up the bandwidth to do 3G networks. Which still won't provide enough spectrum to provide a video phone to everybody who wants one. Not to mention consumer resistence to buying the necessary expensive hardware. Which will go maybe 15 minutes before the battery runs down. Unless it melts first.
Oh well.
I mean, how often have I wanted to describe something to someone else, but just can't seem to get the right words? Assuming this is integrated well enough, just snap a picture and send it along... it's often not worth it to dig out the digital camera, snap a shot, hook it up to the PC, grab the pic, scale it, e-mail it, wait for the other person to get it, etc, etc...
I didn't even think about that, but that about makes it very useful.
Imagine talking to some chick you've never seen before and want to know what she looks like; hey flash your phone!
But seriously, it would be really convenient, as most people already keep cell phones on them all the time. I wouldn't mind have a camera -in- the phone.
can you imagine; a walking army armed with cameras *and* the ability to deliver the picture instantaneously to the place where you don't want it most. this is scary people -- forget Big Brother Survallence (sp?) -- this is the scariest of all, you never know where ppl are looking / taking pictures;
picking your nose in the car on the highway? ha! forget it.
forgot to zip up after going to the bathroom b/c you are hung-over? watch it haunt you
smiled at the bank teller when depositing a check? wait for the divorce...
this is going to be a scary world. before you know it, *you* will be in one of thoes mock-up internet chain letter "caught on camera cheating? priceless" emails
My life in the land of the rising sun.
A review with lots of great pictures can be found here.
That's what I think is cool about this phone. It's got J2ME onboard and runs it really really fast (having seen it demoed at JavaOne).
The first thing I asked myself after reading about putting a camera in a cellphone is "Why would people want to send out photos of their ears?"
I loved the 7650 when it first arrived at Nokia's website, but since then I acquired a Sony Cybershot and a Sony Clié. Know what? I can take pictures whenever I want, and if I need to post them, All I need to do is remove the Memory Stick from the Camera, stick it in the Clié, and dial my ISP (thanks heaven for TDMA mobile phones with data services).
;)
With a stantard TCP/IP connection, I can FTP, mail-attach or post the pictures, edit HTML files to comment the images, you name it.
Not so integrated? OK, but overall, I have much more quality and flexibility. The 7650 took to long to arrive.
Of course, when in deep geek mode, the best thing to do is start ICQ and tease your friends about the beer. People hate the "I'm at the bar, where are you?" line
[]'s Carlos Cardoso - Becoming a brazilian ProBlogger, typo by typo
A more informative review
...picture phones are being plastered all over TV advertisements.
VodaFone are marketing a service called PXT (like txt messages, but pictures, haha). It uses the Sony Ericsson T68i mobile, but apart from that seems pretty similar.
Granted, I don't think any of these are of sufficient quality to grace the pages of National Geographic magazine anytime soon, but they do seem pretty useful for a quick "hey, look at this!". I only hope that carriers can agree on an decent interoperability protocol, and don't charge high data rates for transmitting pictures, which would really shoot this in the foot.
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I got a 7650 this afternoon from work (whee me make MMS-messages, me get nice phone :) ) and I've gotta say that this thing just rocks.
I saw the phone on a mobile communications fair a few months ago and it was slow and buggy but the final version seems to be fast and reliable, no glitches yet... just came back from the bar where I snapped a nice bunch of photos which I can later use to embarass my friends ;)
The screen is big (176x208), bright and clear, at least the same level as a good PDA. :)
The phone can hold almost a hundred pics with the default quality setting which seems adequate, I only managed to snap a bit over 40 pics this evening although I had the phone in my hand to use / show to the curious for nearly the whole evening. Btw, gotta love the polyphonic ringtones, no more crappy beep-beep sounds, the midi tunes on this baby sound really really nice! I guess I'll have to grab the starwars theme midi or something to use as a ringtone, just to hear how good it sounds compared to the oldskool-phones
On the whole, the 7650 is a really nice gadget when disregarding the hefty price tag (about 800EUR in Finland) and the weight (154g). It sure as hell kicks the SonyEricsson T68i:s ass big time in speed, image quality, usability and of course in overall coolness.
A definite must-have for any gagdet freak with enough dough.
Can't wait til Hantro publishes their MPEG-4 player/encoder for this baby.
i have only a nokia 7160, and have not been very impressed with it. the phone is not very well built, the battery will fall off if you look at it funny, the microphone sucks.
i would much rather have a motorola
Why, so the antenna would fall off, instead?
Motorola's phones suck, too.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
In Hong Kong, it is about US$320.e sc.jsp?Pr odID=DP9N7650
:-)
http://www.orangehk.com/eng/eshop/prod_d
I have a chance to play with it for a while, and this thing is cool albeit too bulky and heavy. However, I am amazed on the battery life of this phone, I could play around with the camera, talking on the phone, sending emails and MMS all day without seeing the battery indicator dropped one mark.
One thing I found interesting was when you have the Keypad slide down, set the phone to silent mode, then pretend you are talking on the phone; because of the camera's position, no one will be suspicious of you taking pictures of them!
This is actually cool (and somewhat worrisome). I did an experiment and found that one could managed to sneak into some perfect positions and took pictures of anyone without them knowing it. (And of course those are friends that won't mind me doing this experimentally and I did told them later about what I have done
---
Sic? What sic?
I'll bet the feds are chomping at the bit for the terrorists to go get a few of these babies. Not only can we listen in on their calls, but now we can "see" where they are, and who is around them.
;-)
Smile for the CIA/NSA/FBI/MIB!
Here are the Full Specifications as well as a link to the official 7650 page at Nokia.
Fine, they added a camera to a phone. What I want to know is, with the mumbo-jumbo of different technologies we have deployed in the US, and lots of competing wireless telcos doing different things, will this phone easily integrate with all or most of them, a few of them, or (as I fear) none at all? Perhaps a more general question would be how can a non-industry insider keep up with the basic technology used in cell phones so that I would not have even bothered to ask this question?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Thanks for the link. I noticed further down the page that Nokia 7650 has a built-in Sound Recorder. Is there any info on what format this records in and whether or not you can attach those files to an e-mail sent wirelessly? Could you attach both sound and pictures?
I don't know anything about J2ME, the version of Java for mobile devices that the 7650 uses, but might it be possible to hack the camera into recording video, too?
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
in Japan for quite awhile now. Why not in the US? Oh yeah, there was a slashdot article about that a few days ago. For the latest and greatest in cell phone technology go where I go. http://www.nokia.co.jp
duh.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Dude, most Nokia phones are fantastic. The 6xxx/5xxx series have been the benchmark in which other phones are held against for ages now. I'd guess it's the 7160 model that kinda sucks, it was never made in a TDMA/CDMA version for the US and mostly just used in Europe as a GSM model. Meaning it likely didn't make the cut for durability. I wouldn't give up on Nokia, I've had a 918, 5160, 6180 and now a 8360 and totally been in love with every one.
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
Cory Doctorow was talking about the Journalism 3.0 talk at the Emerging Technologies conference sometime back, and mentioned something insanely significant:
Eventually, when a major event happens, the first imagery of it won't be from government-released photos or even freelance photographers. It'll be anyone in the area with their cell phones, sending images of the disaster/situation off to their friends. Dozens upon dozens of individual, low quality but zero-hour latency images, sent over data networks to remote archives.
That's the future of journalism -- or at least part of it.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky, CISSP
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
1) LED Flashlight - doesn't need to be terribly bright, but bright enough to be useful. On a high density cell phone battery, you'd be able to run for hours w/o running out. (My bike light, plenty bright, burns for weeks on a AA)
2) Infrared universal remote control - Push a "magic button" and you have a programmable, universal remote control. Make an easy overlay-based system so you just key in the manufacturer and model number (SMS style) and you have an instant Remote Control!
You could even base it on a DSP, and just download the codes from your phone company, rather than keep all that crap on your phone! That way it could always be up to date.
THIS WOULD BE FREAKIN' AWESOME!
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Ergh.. dont reply. I have seen a few prices now :(
Looking at around £500!!
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
I moved to Ericson after my last two nokias fell to bits on me. The user interface isn't as nice, but at least I don't have to squeeze my phone together in order to get the screen to work anymore (whoever thought mounting the clip-on cover directly to the LCD screen was a good idea has some serious questions to answer)
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
There is an open standard for picture/video type messaging - it's called MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and is supported by the 7650 and Ericsson T68i. This really only applies to the GSM world, but maybe it will extend out to CDMA etc as it is based on IETF/W3C standards such as SMTP, MIME, SMIL, etc (with a little WAP to present messages on handsets).
For more information on MMS, see http://www.nokia.com/mms/
You can use MMS (basically an easy to use form of email with media attachments) to send pictures to your mailbox, or anyone else's of course. The 7650 is one of the first MMS phones, but the article mentioned it had problems sending to a T68 phone - clearly the phones still have some MMS interop problems despite lots of testing by the MMS-IOP interop group.
To try something close to MMS on a Palm device, download Pixer from www.electricpocket.com - it gives a good idea of how MMS will work when it's rolled out later this year (at least in Europe).
Syncing is already there with SyncML (works well on the Ericsson T68 to sync with PCs), and alerts are there too in most modern phones such as this one.
As for web interfaces - wireless operators are planning to roll out 'unified messaging' in which you have a single mailbox to send/receive voicemail, email, SMS, MMS, etc. And quite a few already let you sign up for new services online (at least in Europe).
My only complaint is that it's rather heavy and bulky. You could put it in your jeans pocket but you wouldn't have much room for anything else.
Personally, I'm not going to buy one as I like my phones small and light, I already have a Cannon Digital IXUS v for photos and my Palm Vx suits most of my needs. I'm not really in the need of something that does everything in one quite yet ...
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
This Post about the Simputer article made me think.
Would a phone with picture taking capabilities be useful for emergency medicine? Maybe a team of surgeons could plan for a specific surgury while a patient is in transit. Maybe they already do this. (Fortunately I've never had to ride in an ambulance)
Yeah - exactly! I mean, perhaps they figure nobody wants a flash on this type of device, because they know much of the attraction is the ability to take discreet photos of the unsuspecting.
Still, when you've got these low-quality (sometimes plastic, not even real glass) optics and cheap digital CCD's, you're simply not going to get a decent picture without bright background lighting.
Even with my $900 Sony digital 8 camcorder, taking still photos to the memory stick is troublesome indoors. Sometimes, you can load the photo into Photoshop and adjust the brightness/contrast and end up with something usable - but by default, it's too dark. I guess I need to buy the light attachment for it.
The other alternative would be attaching an infra-red light, and letting these devices take those photos with a greenish cast, similar to the "night-shot" mode on the camcorders. (The "Blair Witch Project" film effect, basically.)
OK, there is the band issue. That brings up another question, I thought I had seen a US advertisement that some cell phone offering required a tripple band (or perhaps a tripple mode) phone. If we don't use 1800 mhz, what were they talking about? But even if the phone is on the right band, does that mean that the protocols used to pass these pictures from one phone to another would pass cleanly through the clular network? It seems to me (a complete outsider) that what one can build into a celular phone is greatly limited by the underlying network, unless there is a well defined low level protocol that this information can travel on top of. I'm trying to understand the basics of celular communication at a level that would allow things like this camera phone, as well as services like GM's On-Star and phones incorporating GPS devices to play well with other equipment.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Tripple band and tripple mode are two different things. In Europe we generally don't have multi-mode phones because the only network available is GSM. Eventually UMTS will become available, but the current downturn in the economy has put the brakes on that development.
UMTS is the new WCDMA-based 3G network in Europe, with many similarities to the Japanese 3G network (which is already operational).
In the US you have multiple networks: AMPS, D-AMPS, GSM, CDMA-2000. A tripple-mode phone probably supports AMPS, D-AMPS and CDMA-2000.
The SMS and MMS "protocols" are well specified, making it possible to pass data between different handsets. Both SMS and MMS were developed for GSM networks as far as I know. I don't know if they are available in other networks, and if they can cross network boundaries.
Free your mind!