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Pop-Up Cameras Could Soon Be a Mobile Trend (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: There's an interesting concept making its way around Mobile World Congress. Two gadgets offer cameras hidden until activated, which offer a fresh take on design and additional privacy. Vivo built a camera into a smartphone concept that's on a little sliding tray and Huawei will soon offer a MacBook Pro clone that features a camera hidden under a door above the keyboard. This could be a glimpse of the future of mobile design. Cameras have long been embedded in laptops and smartphones much to the chagrin of privacy experts. Some users cover up these cameras with tape or slim gadgets to ensure nefarious players do not remotely activate the cameras. Others, like HP, have started to build in shutters to give the user more control. Both DIY and built-in options require substantial screen bezels, which the industry is quickly racing to eliminate.
With shrinking bezels, gadget makers have to look for new solutions like the iPhone X notch. Others still, like Vivo and Huawei, are look at more elegant solutions than carving out a bit of the screen. For Huawei, this means using a false key within the keyboard to house a hidden camera. Press the key and it pops up like a trapdoor. We tried it out and though the housing is clever, the placement makes for awkward photos -- just make sure you trim those nose hairs before starting your conference call. Vivo has a similar take to Huawei though the camera is embedded on a sliding tray that pops-up out of the top of the phone.
With shrinking bezels, gadget makers have to look for new solutions like the iPhone X notch. Others still, like Vivo and Huawei, are look at more elegant solutions than carving out a bit of the screen. For Huawei, this means using a false key within the keyboard to house a hidden camera. Press the key and it pops up like a trapdoor. We tried it out and though the housing is clever, the placement makes for awkward photos -- just make sure you trim those nose hairs before starting your conference call. Vivo has a similar take to Huawei though the camera is embedded on a sliding tray that pops-up out of the top of the phone.
I'm all for privacy, but this just sounds like another thing that could break on my phone.
I have a Nokia 6650 still kicking about some place.
.. your opportunity to take a photo could be gone at that stage.
Not the clamshell 6650. The very first 6650 that not many were made of. Nokia's first attempt at making a phone for the brand new UMTS network at the time. It has a lense cover, when you slide down the lense cover the camera app automatically opens. Brilliant feature and much better than the smartphone of today where you have to first get rid of the lock screen then navigate to the camera app
There probably won't be another phone like that though, because unlike the 8110 it wasn't in any popular film and nobody remembers it to the extent that they saw it fit to reuse the model number for two completely different phones.
And each of them little pop-up cameras will have it's own tiny pop-up flash, aww..
How about a sliding cover for the Lightning port? Mine keeps getting clogged with pocket lint, even after periodical blowing out with canned air.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Huawei will soon offer a MacBook Pro clone...
How do you do that? Make an average laptop, offer it for sale at exorbitant price, and market the crap out of it?
One of the biggest complaint about the Dell XPS 13 laptop is the camera is at the bottom of the bezel instead of the top (where it is on most laptops). This results in a camera taking photos at less than flattering angles, notably, your nostrils.
This camera, being hidden in the keyboard, has the same issue - it points upwards from the computer, leading to everyone seeing your face and being distracted by your nostrils.
Hope you trimmed your nose hairs, because that's all anyone you're going to be chatting to will be seeing.
Some users cover up these cameras with tape or slim gadgets to ensure nefarious players do not remotely activate the cameras.
Technically, they can still be activated, they just don't send any usable images. The same can not be said for microphones, which record vibration, including the vibration of you typing on a keyboard, and even on your iPhone X surface, which can be used with the other sensor data to infer what you actually typed. Pressure, vibration, gyro, therm, attitude, they're all signals.
Any microprocessors in your phone can also be used to store data in some way shape or form. Keyboards and mice all have buffers.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That is a pretty cool idea: a camera that slides out on a sliding tray. Another cool idea would be to make a phone where the keypad/keyboard slides out. That way you have the whole screen open, without having to type on an on screen keyboard that is obscuring the bottom part of the display.
It's compressed dust and lint you can't just blow it out, you gotta pick it out with a toothpick. Then it will be good as new for a while.
I've had my iPhone 5 for like 6 years and do this 2-3 times a year. Takes 1-2 minutes.
OOo they're getting features that my first 35mm camera had.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I'd settle for a hardwired red LED whenever the camera was active. It needs to be truly hardware connected and not software bypass-able. I believe we all deserve to know when any camera is active, so I'd rather it not be bypass-able without a soldering iron.
Hearkening back to the days of PDAs with a Compact Flash slot on them literally whatever you can support through software, perhaps we should make a move for standardizing camera modules on SDIO? Would be nice to be able to remove/replace the camera at will, as well as to have a full-sized SD slot. The space premium wouldn't be that much worse than any internal camera module i've seen, at least in terms of total volume of the part that must be embedded in the phone... significantly flatter, longer and wider, seems like it would be less of a compromise internally. Unfortunately, there are practical issues... seems nobody wants expansion slots anymore. From the consumer's perspective, it's one more thing to break/lose, and from the manuf perspective, it's likely to be seen as an obstacle to getting people to upgrade their phones every couple years.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
If you're really worried about your camera being accessed without your knowledge, a small piece of electrical tape over it should take care of the problem, is 100% effective and trustworthy, and doesn't require redesign of your phone, installing any software, upgrading any software, or any technical know-how other than how to operate a pair of scissors and being able to distinguish between the sticky side and the non-sticky side. Also, time-proven, used to work just great on webcams.
Just have a bezel wide enough to accommodate those sorts of things. Problem solved.
Does anyone actually want the entire face to be a display? My hands are not two-dimensional, so I want a bit of space the the left and right. I couldn't care less about space above and below the display. I do, however, care about having a hole cut in to the display. Who actually thinks that's a great idea?
Required reading for internet skeptics
You clearly have some kind of hyperhidrosis condition, but instead of producing excessive sweat you produce excessive lint. But don't worry, medical science is working on a solution for this already!
Early Nokias (and several other phones) had a small sliding shutter that covered the lens. This isn't new.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
These camera will be thinner than standard camera. This will make it challenging to create optics. Anything you can do with this camera, you can do better with thicker camera. So unless there is a strong reason to make it popup (which I don't see), it won't fly. Unnecessarily adds a a moving part in otherwise essentially rigid device.
If it collects lint, that's not a port cover, that's a belly button!
Yes, you could use second camera - however that means you need to carry a second (and often reletively bulky) object with the laptop. This is a slight against the portability concept of an "ultra portable" laptop, and does not change the fact that the camera is a redundant feature.
It belongs on pages like this
For all the hardware I won't put on my network, a Huawei MacBook Pro clone tops the list. Or pretty much anything made by them, for that matter.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I suspect that's why manufacturers didn't initially include them, that and the additional cost.
Actually, back in the PDA era, long before the smartphone/selfie craze,
one of the first PDA to feature a built-in camera - the Sony Clie - had a rotating camera.
(Of course the main reason back then wasn't as much privacy, as it was about the price of putting 2 cameras vs. one good quality camera that can be rotated either into photo or selfie position).
Even a few of the aftermarket SDIO camera did have rotating cameras (again, the main reason being that the camera could still be rotated into the desired position to capture the desired picutre no matter which esoteric position the SD card port was on your speficit non-standard PDA).
But due to it being easily breakable, manufacturer moved quickly out of it and started eventually proposing dual cameras.
Now I suspect that they going back to this partially for the same reasons :
Now that we have reached "peak smartphone" and not everyone is rushing to replace their smartphone with the newest shiny every 6 months (because basically the old smartphone still does the job), the manufacturer are happy to re-introduce an easily breakable feature (phone not being extremely durable = people will eventually need to replace it), and market it by leveraging the people's interest in privacy.
I'd pay extra for a phone with real physical switches that interrupt current flow to things like the camera, microphone, GPS, radios, etc. Software based buttons can't be trusted.
Even something simple that prevents button presses while the phone is in my pocket would be welcome. Back in the day things like portable CD players had lock switches on the back of the device for exactly that reason.
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People couldn't handle a CD/DVD ROM tray without breaking it, so I for one welcome another thing to charge people to fix.
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