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How the Camera Phone Changed the World
theodp writes "Ten years after the amazing Philippe Kahn married a cell phone and a digital camera to capture the birth of daughter Sophie, Slate takes a look at the impact of the camera phone, the gadget that perverts, vigilantes, and celebrity stalkers can all agree on. 'With this kind of device,' Kahn told Wired, 'you're going to see the best and the worst of things.'"
Actually, camera phones do have uses beyond taking fuzzy pictures of your drunk friends. Unfortunately they don't seem to be coming over to the states for some reason.
If you've seen any Japanese magazines or websites lately, you'll notice square barcode-type things on some ads or sites. See the bottom left of this site. They allow you to use your phone camera to take a pic, then your camera web browser goes to an address encoded in the pic without having to type in the address. Basically the same thing Cue:Cat did, but on commodity hardware.
Okay, now you're thinking, "So what? I can get ads easier?", but there are other uses for the technology, too. I've heard some European countries have methods of paying for stuff using a cell phone, where you take a pic of a barcode like that, and the price is charged to your cell account.
Basically, don't just think of it as "A crappy camera glued to a cell phone", but as "An optical sensor attached to a pervasivly-networked device". There is a world of possibility in using it as an input device for ubiquitous computing. Where other attempts to make computer interaction seamless in the real world have failed, the camerphone might succeed because it uses technology that is useful for other things (camera + phone, regular printer + ink), and widely adopted by the public already. It's all a matter of software to make it useful, no new harware needed.