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Nokia Shows Off Megapixel Camera Phone
Anonymous Coward writes "According to PC World, the Nokia 7610 has been announced at Cebit in Germany - it boasts a megapixel camera (1152 x 864 pixels), 65,000 color screen, and 4x zoom, along with an MP3 music player and smart phone features that allow users to manage and edit digital images. It can also create short films of up to 10 minutes and with the Movie Director application users can add special effects and music to the video clips." Other readers point out a picture of the phone, which comes with the LifeBlog software "to help people organise the information they capture about their lives on handsets."
Locker rooms everwhere are in jeapordy, complete with automated pr0n-site deployment!
You joke, but municipal swimming pools in my county have banned camera phones from their changing rooms, for the stated reason that paedophiles might use them.
the 72MB are marketspeak for 8mb internal plus 64mb sd card.
Take a good look, iTunes users. This phone has AAC support. One of the few players outside the iPod to do it. Don't take that to mean you can play music from the iTunes Music Store, I doubt it supports the Fairplay DRM, but now you can use the smaller better (IMHO) format than MP3!
http://www.mobitopia.com/20040317.html#155506
Nokia do make nice devices. Phones, though, are a compromise. I've had a look at things like the XDA (you look a real dork holding a big wide PDA to your ear when making a phone call, and it also runs Windows - I don't want MS bloatware in my pocket thanks). The Sony-Ericcson T800/T900 has a much nicer form factor, but you've still got to type with a stylus when you text someone or need to enter a URL.
I bought a new phone less than a month ago, and I looked at all of these. Then I saw the Nokia 6820. It is the same size as my old cheap-o basic Nokia phone, so it fits easily in any pocket I care to put it in...but it folds out - with a full QWERTY keyboard. Although I had to compromise in screen size (standard mobile phone screen) to have a genuine pocket-sized phone, the fold-out keyboard more than makes up for it: texting is fast, if I'm waiting for a plane, I can go onto IRC (using a neat little open source J2ME IRC client), I can ssh into a server if I get the call saying there's trouble and do some basic troubleshooting all with a keyboard. I couldn't care less about cameras particularly.
The camera in my 6820 is useful in case of emergency, or if I really need an image right now and to hell with the quality because it means I now always have a camera with me. If I get rear-ended at traffic lights, I can take some photos of the incident to supply with the insurance forms as an example.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
http://nokia.com/nokia/0,,54665,00.html
Yepp, that's digital:, 00.html
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,8764,54962
Still no flash, though. Guess I'll stick with my Pentax Optio S4 for a while longer.
I wonder when digital cameras will have bluetooth in them so I can take real pictures with a real camera and send them through the phone.
AAC support on Nokia mobiles is nothing new--the Nokia 3300 and the already discontinued Nokia 5510 have supported AAC for quite some time already.
Here's an another (non-slashdotted) picture of the phone.
It really doesn't matter what Nokia put into their phones as long as they don't know how to make quality.
Here in Norway clerks in several stores where asked if they would recommend Nokia to their customers and almost everyone said no! They have too much customer complaints on Nokia phones. Every third Nokia phone sold in Norway has to get service within 6 months...
The most recommended phones where Siemens and Sony Ericson. They only have to have one out of ten phones into services within 6 months.
For the employee friends, visitors, vendors and contractors, this means they are immediately banned from any and all sites for a duration of 3 years. The employee who has friends onsite using a cameraphone is immediately terminated.
They are being very harsh, but these are the rules. Having someone walking around with a miniature camera in their hands inside labs, through buildings, etc. is an ENORMOUS risk to them.
Check with your employer first, before you invest in one of these phones, or you could find yourself out on the curb without a job.
Cellphone vendors need to be very careful with their product lines, and includes phones that do NOT include these features, so that they can continue to sell product. Don't just cater to the teenagers who think having a camera and a phone is "cool". Cater to the people who actually have to pay for those cellphone bills... the parents, and the businesspersons who actually use the devices for what they are.. a phone.
Careful if you're buying a camera phone. They're rather good fun, but you need to know upfront whether you're going to be able to transfer pictures onto a PC directly.
I know a number of people who have to send a costly email/photomessage for every picture they want to move off their phone, because their network operator (from whom they bought the phone) has disabled the functionality to transfer a picture over a wire/bluetooth/IR.
The real annoying thing is the definition of pixel itself. Since sensors for 3 colors are needed most manufacturers count one sensor for one color as a whole pixel - although normaly three of them are needed to cover the whole colorspace. This is like tripling your monitor resolution by not counting pixels but phosphor/lcd fields for every color! Furthermore the sensors for every color are not lined up as on a monitor but arranged in a checkerboard pattern like this:(I don't now anymore if the color used twice is red or blue. This increases the SNL for this color.)
Now for each quadruple of sensors the data for one pixel is generated. There is no more information to get out of the CCD than this. After this the camera interpolates the data to increase the number of pixels used in the actual file the camera stores. What interpolation algorithm is used and how good it works is bound to the camera manufacturer.
This will go on until multi-layered CCDs emerge on market. These use one spot on the chip to measure all three colors by layering the sensors. My guess is they will use marketing-speak as for example using 'triple' as prefix for everything.
Actually, it's standard for digital camera manufacturers to quote the megapixel rating based on the entire sensor, rather than the output resolution. The sides of the sensor are blacked out, for calibration, and don't appear in the final image.
1600x1200, for example, is the standard 2.0 megapixel resolution (but 1600x1200 is actually only 192k pixels).
The full spec is here http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,54665,00.html. Not a bad bit of kit at all.
The rest of the Nokia kit from ceBIT is visible at http://www.nokia.com/cebit2004/new_releases.html
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Some digital cameras do have Bluetooth.
My Sony digital video camera has it.
sony had this out in 2002... and it did work through a bluethooth phone...
Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-FX77
A pretty sweet camera... great design... i'm STILL using the earlier model with the same design...
you mean the foveon sensor: http://www.foveon.com/X3_tech.html
It's true that the image often is out of focus in different parts on camera phones and the colors are bleeding into each other, this is mostly because they use (cheap?)plastic lenses with poor optical qualities rather than the size.
But you are correct the higher pixel counts is worth nothing unless they improve the lenses.
The 640x480 I have in my old Nokia phone could have produced a good picture if they had installed a proper lens. I guess they thought that since it was so low resolution it didn't matter,but it does. (or it was just a proof-of-concept phone)
> It may be hidden in the price of the phone or the monthly fees, but it's there
> someplace.
I pay 15 UKP a month. For that I get 750 mins of off peak calls to any land line and T-Mobile (my supplier) mobile. I also get 50 text messages. I also get the phone, which is pretty neat (it supports java, has blue tooth, infrared, 65,000+ colour screen, camera, voice recorder, plays midi files etc). At the end of 12 months I sign up for another year and get another phone free (well, technically I've actually been getting 100 UKP off the cost of a new phone - its just that this phone has an `upgrade price` of 100 UKP).
I can understand your `I just want a phone` attitude entirely, but it's not like these features are at the expense of a perfectly satisfactory phone. They are in addition to it. In fact, its exactly because the phone has so many good features that ensures people from multiple target groups (business people, kids who want games, women who want a sexy phone etc) want it and make it something that can be mass produced to keep the cost down. You think the phone would be much cheaper if it didn't have Java, or Bluetooth, or a camera? As long as it costs 100 UKP or less, I don't care what it costs! The price would only be an issue if I lost/had stolen this phone before a year is up and I'd have to get a phone to use for the duration of my 12 month contract. But I've already got 2 or 3 phones from previous contracts laying around that I could use.