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The Nokia 7650 Cell Phone w/ Integrated Camera

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the bring-on-the-integration dept.

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.

15 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm... by stirfry714 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. P800 by killa-b(a+was+taken) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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    the better alternative is the Sony Ericsson P800 wich is a world phone, and a camera and uses a newer version of the Symbian OS.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

  3. Re:It won't be here soon by Jack+Porter · · Score: 3, Informative

    HELLO? Cingular and Voicestream offer GPRS in their GSM1900 markets. AT&T is also rolling out GSM850 and GSM1900, and offering GPRS phones for their mMode service.

  4. Review with pictures by dracvl · · Score: 5, Informative

    A review with lots of great pictures can be found here.

  5. It runs Java too by wal9000 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

  6. My first question... by Guppy06 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?"

  7. 7650 review by halk · · Score: 3, Informative

    A more informative review

  8. I got one of these by QoluB · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Official Details by martyb · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here are the Full Specifications as well as a link to the official 7650 page at Nokia.

  10. can someone please explain underlying technlogy? by frovingslosh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

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  11. They've had this by Apreche · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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  12. The Future Of Journalism by Effugas · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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. Re:The Future Of Journalism by brianvan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This has already happened. Many really major, really spontaneous news events are now caught by amateur photographers, tourists, or anyone who happened to be in range of any kind of camera as a news event was breaking nearby.

      I think of the Concorde crash in France, for which most of the really spectacular (albeit morbid) images of the event were captured by people passing by in cars. By the time the professionals got there, they managed to capture the "huge blackened crater" shots that are all we see from most plane crashes. (I do not mean to minimalize the loss of life from this event - plane crashes are very tragic and horrific in nature. I know, because I had to attend a closed casket funeral for a personal role model as a result of one)

      The World Trade Center disaster pretty much cemented this phenomenon. As a direct witness of that horror, I think it was very important that there were hundreds of thousands of still and video images taken from countless angles of the destruction of the Twin Towers. This was a disaster affecting many people, and it was quite symbolic that the disaster was witnessed, captured, and expressed by common people through modern photography - alongside the shots that the major news groups and nearby professionals obtained.

      Photography is expression, and group expression can be a powerful thing. The proliferation of cameras throughout the world - with all combinations of small, cheap, fast, disposable, easy to use, flexible, high quality, and accurate - is something that contributes to humanity much in the way the printing press did. Or as we hope the Internet does.

      There will still be room for professionals. For one thing, we don't want random tourists in the White House or at the Kremlin to take pictures of important meetings and speeches. Also, we don't want the only pics of someone's 74th home run coming from a 640x480 cellphone shot. Finally, future brides-to-be will probably not let you cheap out and have Uncle Mort take the wedding pics.

      (I can see Rob Malda talking in a whiny voice: "But Kathleen, honey, it's a 4 megapixel! And it has a timer! Please?")

  13. Standards by Cato · · Score: 3, Informative

    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/

  14. Size by Mr_Silver · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I've played with one for a while and it's a very nice phone. Lovely interface and the camera picture quality is better than the T68i and Camera attachment.

    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 ...

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