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Handhelds Hardware

Cheap Cell Phone Cameras 145

Posted by michael from the bond-james-bond dept.
prostoalex writes "Apparently an Israeli company figured out the way to put a 376x296 digital camera into cell phones for less than $15." We've done previous stories about a PDA/phone with included camera, but this could be integrated into a regular phone so that your conversation partner could get a nice real-time view of your ear.
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Cheap Cell Phone Cameras More

Cheap Cell Phone Cameras

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  • At least you can see if someone's listening or the phone is on the table..
    • This will be a real boon to the telemarketers that call me. Generally, I get a call, wait for the guy/gal to pick up, and the following conversation ensues:

      TM: Hello, is there?
      Me: Yep, hang on a second...

      At this point, The phone goes on a sofa or something, and I come back in about 10 minutes. I haven't had one yet that wanted to talk to me that badly.

      Unfortunately, if they can see I'm not trying to get myself, they'll hang up, and call some other poor sap. At least this way, I can tie them up for a little while.

    • The most common conversation:

      Other end: Hows it goin...
      Your end: Fine, lemme turn on my camera.
      Other end: Alright but to see your picture I need to attach my lcd to my phone.
      *** 5 minutes later ***
      Other End: Pictures coming in fine.. May I suggest a Q-tip? BTW, how are you able to hear what I'm saying?
      Your End: Maybe it isn't poor connectivity...
      (you get cut off)
      Other End: Wow look at that eardrum resonate.
      Your End: Cool.
      Other End: Cool.
      *** another minute passes ***
      Other End: This is boring.
      Your End: Lemme show you the hole in my pocket.
      Other End: No wait!! Ahh!
      *** Disconnect ***
  • Now we can get a full ear examination through our ears.
  • What happens when you run out of the shower to answer a ringing phone... see, thats when you need a camera.
    • ...to the idea of an obscene phone call.
    • That's part of why camera phones never caught on:
      • So why don't you show me a picture?
        er, uhm, because... I'm naked...
        so why don't you show me your picture?
        click
      • HI {boss, partner, etc,}, I'm stuck in traffic, I'll be there as soon as I can!
        Oh yeah, show me a picture!
      One nice thing about cell phones is that you can have them anywhere .
      Do you really want your customer to know that you're negotiating that $2M contract from your bathroom, or the nearby nude beach? Are those few times when it actually works to connect your Digital Camera to your Cellphone (doable as another reader pointed out) worth the loss of privacy that comes from having it on all the time?

      Besides -- in those situations where I'm really interested in sending an image over my cell phone, it's more likely that I want to send a 1K x 2K image than a 200x300 image that barely shows any detail at all. In that case, it's going to be a real digital camera that I'll want to use.

  • but this could be integrated into a regular phone so that your conversation partner could get a nice real-time view of your ear
    Or, as related to
    yesterday's story [slashdot.org] a lovely view of the sandwich I am eating.

  • Nice toncils! (Score:1, Troll)

    by oever ( 233119 )
    What if they put a camera in this tooth mobile phone [reuters.com]?

    Now people on the other side can go: "brush your teeth!" instead of "clean you ear!".
  • The research is on to produce a long-lasting, cheap LiIon battery to power mobile phones augmented with a camera. And why are accessories so freakin' expensive?! I think I paid $30 for a leather case last time!

  • 1.) Cell phones are definitely getting banned in cars now.

    2.) Could be useful if you have an ear infection and call your doctor tho. Add one of those thinkgeek diode flashlights...
    • 1.) Cell phones are definitely getting banned in cars now.

      Hmm. Let's just forget about a hands-free kit and mount your phone to your front bumper. That - combined with a way to remotely stear the car with the cell phone at the other end - should give you the ultimate Pole Position [atariage.com] experience! And on top of that: it's much safer to crash your car when you're not in it!

  • Nokia 7650 (Score:3, Informative)

    by bebroll ( 516251 ) <bb&bjamin,de> on Thursday June 20, 2002 @08:55AM (#3735369)
    Check this [nokia.com] page where Nokia show their new 7650 - supposed to get to the European market at the end of the second quarter of 2002. This features a build in camera for sending images via MMS. I already tried it at the Cebit this year and it looks great ... Cheers, bebroll
    • Here in Orlando, we've actually started getting radio advertisements for this phone with camera capabilities clearly stated in the ad.
    • Hi, We've had one on trial for 2-3 weeks by now. The screen and camera are ok i guess. But the phone is a bit on the large side. I stick to my 6310 for now. Just my two euro cents.

  • Really popular in Saudi Arabia (Score:5, Informative)

    by night_flyer ( 453866 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @08:55AM (#3735371) Homepage
    they use them to spy on women [worldtribune.com] in changing rooms...

  • Let's say we put that video feature in our cell phones. It's an interesting, even nice idea for us geeks out here. If we've left that phone on all the time, and those phones are sending minimal signals back to local towers, so they can track where we are, thereby giving us the best signal ...why wouldn't the phone ROM include code to allow someone to wake the phone remotely, and activate the audio pickup, and now the camera?

    That would be a darn convenient trick if one of our fine government agencies who have broad wire tapping powers, could do. Imagine how easy it would be to track the movements and activities of a suspected criminal! You could just remotely turn on his phone, and listen in while he does a drug deal. Maybe even get incriminating footage!
    • "why wouldn't the phone ROM include code to allow someone to wake the phone remotely, and activate the audio pickup, and now the camera?"

      I have heard from a friend who worked at One2One in the uk that it was posible to uplaod new firmware to a phone which allowed it to automaticaly answer calls and transmit the audio even if the user had switched their phone off. This was several years ago so I hate to think what they can do now...

      /me decideds to program a firewall for his mobile.. blocking spam/unsolcited calls/SMS/firmware.

      Hopefully I will be ready for IPO not long after 3G phones are widespread and people are sick to death of location-based advertising which is going to be a large feature in the consumer tarrifs (where as bussines pay many times the service charge but dont recive a hundred special offers every time they walk down the street)

    • It blocks light and protects the lens!

  • Real-time video (Score:5, Informative)

    by Falrick ( 528 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @08:55AM (#3735374) Homepage
    The problem with real-time video isn't figuring out how to get a camera into the phone, its a question of bandwidth. Second generation (2G) phones only have about 14.4 Kbps available to them to share between voice and data using a single traffic channel. Newer systems, such as some 2.5G and 3G systems, have substantially more bandwidth available. 1X systems, a 3G extension, has quite a lot of bandwidth available and I have seen a demo of real-time streaming video on these phones. Very impressive stuff. The only problem is that for the most part, the high-bandwidth standards generally expect that you won't be moving, or moving very slowly, when you are using high-bandwidth applications.

    One method of achieving the high-throughput is to allocate your call multiple traffic channels. One of the problems lies in handing off from cell to cell as you are moving down the highway. Getting the handoff scheduled, and perhaps even rerouting the data to the new cell, isn't really the problem. Its what to do if there just aren't enough traffic channels available to accomodate your usage on the next cell, or any cell that could service you.

    Couple that with the fact that I think that most people are more interested in having higher cell-phone reliability than ooh-ah features, add in financially troubled providers, and I think that it will be quite a while before we actually see this in the US. Europe may be differnt as they seem to be lower on the curve of early adopters.
    • " The problem with real-time video isn't figuring out how to get a camera into the phone, its a question of bandwidth."


      How about intergrated 802.11a/b/g in cell phones so we can download the video email's along with our daiy mountain of spam.

    • timing is key (Score:2, Insightful)

      by eracerblue ( 473104 )

      if you read the article you might actually notice this:

      This device is expected to be ready in two years.

      So, in other words, by the time this thing gets released, it will be obsolete.
      The company may as well file for bankruptcy right now.

  • Just think what the pr0n industry would do with this! They're always early adopters - wireless pr0n!
  • Conventional digital cameras use relatively expensive charge-coupled chips (CCD). A newer, but lower quality method uses the same technology as computer chips to make sensors for about a dollar. These have been used in toys such as the Game Boy, Barbie, and Hello Kitty cameras.

  • Wireless camera feed (Score:2, Interesting)

    by z_gringo ( 452163 )
    what would be really nice would be if they could use those cameras to provide a wireless feed to a remote location in real time. But I don't think the bandwidth is quite there yet.

    Picture a webcam that goes anywhere.
    • I believe that is something like what CNN/M$NBC/Fox used to film from Afghanistan... remember it looked like they were streaming the video using Real and over 56k!

      I think they were using satellite phones but I don't buy it, the quality sometimes was like 14.4.

  • Well (Score:2)

    by hrieke ( 126185 )
    It should make wiretapping that much easier. Just add the faulty facual recognition program and then you know if the guy you are tracking is talking with others that you might have an interest in, or is having a private conversation with his doctor.

    Humor aside, am I the only one who is bothered by the ability to use the camera in way which where not intended.

  • Are these really useful? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nomad7674 ( 453223 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @09:05AM (#3735414) Homepage Journal
    I think someone has to ask if these kinds of applications are really useful for cell phones in the first place. Right now, it seems like companies are scrambling to bring together all kinds of disparate technology so that their "ComboTech" can each be the NEXT BIG THING. Putting a camera onto a PDA makes a certain amount of sense - PDAs are meant to hang with you and let you record things on the go. But phones? Picturephones have been around for a while (for an interesting view of them, check out the movie MOTHER by Albert Brooks [imdb.com]) and have never caught on.

    While some of the lack has to be due to the low picture quality, some of it is simply due to the fact that phones are NOT A VISUAL MEDIUM. A person using a phone is doing so to communicate verbally, not with body langugae. Until a new form factor emerges for visual communication (I like the communicators in EARTH: FINAL CONFLICT [efc.com]) I think this kind of work is a dead end.

    • A person using a phone is doing so to communicate verbally, not with body langugae.

      Heh. You've obviously never been stuck in rush hour traffic behind some moron talking on his/her cellphone, gesticulating furiously as he/she makes a point, nodding and shaking his/her head, and generally looking like the idjit they are ;)
    • I believe this is the same big question people were asking just before cell phones hit the market. There is a big chance you dont see an actual need for this, but I'll just give it a year after it hits the streets, and nobody will know how they lived without it.

    • It's not yourself speaking you want to visualize - it's your environment. I personally think that transmitting a photo of your beach vacation is silly, but on-the-fly image recognition, OCR, and translation services [iht.com] could actually have something in them. The phone-camera combination is your light-weight client, and the hard processing is done remotely, probably as a pay service.

      I personally wouldn't mind having a huge, convenient visual dictionary available. Point, shoot, wait, and read:

      "The Sydney opera house, built in blah blah, Press 'more' for further information."

      "The object you are looking at is a Bengalese tiger. Run."

      Come to think of it - Google, need a project manager for this? ;)

      • It's not yourself speaking you want to visualize - it's your environment.

        Darn right, and true of any video link. I can't count the number of times I've been called by family & friends to help with a computer problem, where I would've killed to be able to see what they were doing (instead of trying to figure it out by listening to their description of the "square shape on the screen with a big gray bar shape, and then the little rounded shape in the corner with a word on it").

    • You are wrong because... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by horza ( 87255 )
      ... speaking as a consumer I'm going to go out and get the first decent mobile with camera built in. It's going to be great to be able to whip it out at a bar or party when someone decides to make a fool of themselves :-) As for "A person using a phone is doing so to communicate verbally" that simply isn't true in Europe. My friends and I tend to split our usage 50/50 between voice and text messaging. I agree with the picture quality statement though, I want at least 640x480 so I can put the pics up on a web site.

      Phillip.
      • ...speaking as a consumer who will never own a PDA and who doesn't buy gadgets generally, I think a picture-phone might actually be pretty handy on some occasions. For instance, if I had one of those when I witnessed a hit-and-run accident, that would have been nice. It could also serve as a good deterrent. Assuming the picture can be uploaded quickly, who would mug/kill a person that had just taken a picture of them?
    • Stop thinking about how people use technology today and think about how they could use it tomorrow, and how much it's actually worth.

      Most people don't use PDAs, because most people don't NEED PDAs, certainly not enough to hook one on their belt. They're great for supergeeks and very busy people, but not for the general public. Most non-obstinate people would like to have a mobile phone though, and would like their mobile do stuff that's useful on the road (phone, messaging, address book, camera, and information services).

      Side note - I don't like carrying a lot of stuff around. As far as I'm concerned, I should never have more than three things in my pants (no not THOSE you perv) - my keys, my wallet w/cards+money, and a pen. Possibly a phone small enough to fit in my pocket (nokia 8260 for instance). None of this belt clip shit for me, thanks. I don't carry stuff around because I think it might be useful - I carry stuff around that it sucks to be without when I need them. PDAs don't qualify, when the pen and a few slips of paper in my wallet do the job well enough.

      Videophones never caught one because there's no point in sending a continuous video stream of your face (unless, of course, you're getting naked, and then it's pointed elsewhere). In fact 99% of the time you wouldn't even want to send video, for various reasons. But a mobile phone can be used anywhere and it would be great if it could take pics of the immediate area for purposes of analysis and communication. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
      • Videophones never caught one because there's no point in sending a continuous video stream of your face (unless, of course, you're getting naked, and then it's pointed elsewhere).

        That's exactly why I don't want a camera in my phone, though it's more an issue at home than mobile for obvious reasons: I don't always answer the phone in a state where the person on the other end wants a picture... if there's a camera attached, there are going to be any number of embarrassing incidents where pictures get sent by accident...

  • "All they would see is the inside of your ear"

    If you have speakerphone on your cell phone... You would just hold it in front of you.

    I would also agree that 15 bucks is great for a camera attachment, but most cell phones don't have color screens yet, and I think a b&w pic is pretty pointless. I think they should focus on getting video phones in our houses first...

    Although from the looks of this [indranet.co.nz] article maybe its all going to be the same...

    Just my $.02
    • I Agree a 40 x 120 pixel b&w screen is useless. Personally, I feel the same about the "high-res" colour screens in i-mode phones - or the preview panels on photo camera's for that matter. Hopefully (in the unforeseeable future) we'll have video beamers small and cheap enough to fit into our phones.

      Still, $15 dollars for the camera is a good start for Starwars-like holographic communicators!
    • " I would also agree that 15 bucks is great for a camera attachment, but most cell phones don't have color screens yet, and I think a b&w pic is pretty pointless."

      Most new phones will have colour screen, though even a b&w preview is fine as long as the shot is stored at a decent resolution and colour depth. After all, I expect the picture from a digital video camera to come out crisp and clear, not like the small bitty image I see in the LCD viewfinder. Most of us that fork out for the phones with cameras will be people that have PCs to download to, though I think many of us will be holding off under we get higher than the "376-by-296-pixels".

      Phillip.

  • Other way around is much better (Score:3, Interesting)

    by magi ( 91730 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @09:06AM (#3735418) Homepage Journal
    Cramming a small camera in a cell phone results only in useless crappy quality pictures. Not a good idea.

    Putting a cell phone - or network connection - to digital cameras is a much nicer idea.

    Yesterday, I purchased Sony TRV50E digital video camera that has Bluetooth connection. By chance, I happen to own a Nokia 6310i cell phone, which has Bluetooth and GPRS.

    TRV50E has a built-in web browser and mail client in the camera and 3,5 inch touch-screen. I can now take 1300x1024 stills with the video camera, or 320x240 MPEG-2s, and write normal e-mails and attach the stills or video clips as email attachments, using the cell phone as a modem. It's also nice to surf the web using a "large" screen and a stylus, much nicer than with any WAP crap.

    Rather nice web-pad...ehm...web-brick, eh?

    Well, in theory; the video camera connects just fine with the cell phone, and makes a PPP connection, but the GPRS connection fails for some reason. I'm investigating the problem, but unfortunately these cameras and cell phones are not yet too common even here in Finland...
    • yes! that's getting close to what I personally feel is the 'right way to go'...

      Rather than having a cellphone with a crappy-ass camera in it, a PDA with a decent camera, and a digital camera (completely redundant now), none of which can communicate with each other and all being far more expensive (well, even just $15 more expensive...) than is necessary, I think i'd want to have:

      1: A *small* cellphone that's very good at being a cellphone, carrying voice and data, and nothing else.
      2: A PDA with a decent screen and input device that would mean that it's not bordering on masochism to browse the 'net and write emails with
      3: A nice digital camera (this could possibly be substituted for a decent camera built into the PDA, although a real digital camera would probably destroy anything that could be fit into a PDA)..

      and then allow all the devices to communicate with each other via bluetooth (or, hell, even just little wires to start off with)..

      That way, you have a set of good, *small* components, each suited perfectly for doing exactly, and only, what you need to do on each one. What's the point of having a tiny crappy screen, a tiny crappy camera, and a tiny crappy input device on your phone, which is now completely overloaded with crap that would be a pain in the butt to use, and isn't even very good?

      With the modular and specific designs for each component, not only will all the devices work better (cellphone battery doesnt have to power needless extra cameras and screens and the like) but the whole experience will be infinitely more enjoyable..

      I'm sure other people have said basically this same thing, I know I'm not the only one who thinks that feature-bloat, especially in hardware, is far less desirable than having one or two devices which are dedicated to doing their job very well?.... I also know that you've been able to do things somewhat like this for a while now, but as evidenced by this and other recent articles, people seem to be moving further and further away from this more sensible method..

    • Depends of your needs.

      I am about to buy a mini digital camera. Maybe a small aiptek pencam camera or a logitech credit card sized camera. Picture quality is not great, but I want something I can carry around wherever I go, without thinking about it.

      I already carry a cell phone, so for someone like me one with an integrated digital camera could be very nice.
    • TRV50E has a built-in web browser and mail client in the camera and 3,5 inch touch-screen. I can now take 1300x1024 stills with the video camera, or 320x240 MPEG-2s, and write normal e-mails and attach the stills or video clips as email attachments, using the cell phone as a modem.

      Don't you pay by the MB for GPRS? Isn't that like a $1 email?
      • Don't you pay by the MB for GPRS? Isn't that like a $1 email?

        Nope, I have a flat rate GPRS connection, 16 euros ($20) a month. Well, it's a special offer; the typical GPRS cost here in Finland is around 2 euros/MB ($2,5/MB). Well, yeah, that would be a bit too much for emailing MPEG clips...

  • ...so that your conversation partner could get a nice real-time view of your ear.

    And you could get nice real-time audio of him looking at your ear.

  • these cheap cameras are basically camera obscuras. no lenses, just a small enough hole to define the image. It works, but I remember seeing these somewhere before, and not just in Cryptonomicon
  • if the camera is on the other side of the phone, looking away from the person talking... It'll be the end of:

    Husband: No honey, i'm not at the strip club! I'm just working late.

    • Well, I can see that sort of thing being commonplace between parents and children - after all, most parents buy their kids mobile phones to keep track of them.

      "No Mom, I'm at the mall with Josie and Kim"
      "Prove it..."

      If I was 15, I certainly wouldn't want one.
    • Or it could bring a fresh start to

      husband: Well, I can see what you are wearing, no I see what you are doing...

      of course, that is probably when he will crash his car into a telephone pole.

  • As someone who drives a high riding truck I can tell you over the years I have seen some strange stuff. Specially dudes on the high way with the crucise locked jerking the old chicken at 80 miles an hour. I guess you gotta do someone on those long trips.

    But now with a camera, yech, suppose mom calls?

    Puto
  • If its in the receiver, then you get a great shot of your earwax

    if its in the mouthpiece, you'll get a free tonsil inspection

    if it's on the back... well. you'll get a shot of your hand.

    Too bad the camera doesn't have flash though. I could just imagine it for cell-phone drivers.

    "These camera phones are great! Yes, buy the phone company stocks, buy! BUY!"

    "Actually, now that I have had a chance to think about it. Sell the phone stocks."

    :-)

  • This is GREAT for shopping!!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @09:29AM (#3735521) Homepage Journal
    'Ring ring'

    'Hello?'

    'It's me, I'm at the store, do you want ceiling fixtures that look like THIS?'

    'Nah that's the wrong shape, find something octagonal'

    'MMMk - ciao!'

  • ...using a regular computer: Check it out! [monitorcamera.com]

    im not in any way affiliated with the site...

  • Why this is useful (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cato ( 8296 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @09:36AM (#3735558)
    I think picture messaging (part of MMS [Multimedia Messaging Service] in GPRS networks) will be huge, and this camera chip will help it take off. If you can send a picture to anyone with an MMS mobile phone or an email account, you can send postcards to friends and 'how do I fix this' messages to suitable experts, and get 'top 5 goals' messages, photos from Internet personal ads, etc... The more people have a camera built into their phone, the more they will use it (though probably never as much as plain text SMS).

    MMS phones are already available in Europe (Ericsson T68i, with Nokia 7650 soon) where MMS is just starting - in Japan, J-Phone has had a huge success with picture messaging, known as Sha-Mail (over 4 million picture messaging handsets sold). Watch this space...

    Even if you don't have a mobile phone, you'll be able to send email with picture/sound/video attachments to anyone with an MMS phone.
    • I think GPRS will be struggling in two years and in hindsight will be quite a disapointment.
      GPRS is finally a here and now solution in many parts of the US though not everywhere, but it's also pricey.
      While many devices such as handhelds already support GPRS, almost every handheld manufacturer in Taiwan is promising 802.11x by the second end of 2002. So if this product is supposed to be hitting the maket in 2004 I think it's going to miss the boat.
      I'm the first one to say that CPU advances are hitting the wall hard and progress will be slowing soon, but wireless networking is another story. Betting against a big uptick in genuine wireless broadband in favor of stop gap solutions like GPRS seems short sighted.
      • GPRS will be everywhere that GSM exists today (i.e. available in almost every country), a fairly slow but always-available packet-based transport - it is sometimes unreliable at present at least in the UK, but it generally works OK and is fast enough for short emails and suitably small web pages. Great for killing time if you are waiting to meet someone and have exhausted your AvantGo offline reading.

        GPRS will also be upgraded to EDGE in many countries, tripling capacity and improving performance a lot. W-CDMA/UMTS (i.e. true 3G for GSM operators) is much more expensive to roll out but will provide more flexibility and performance - the real issue is whether 3G will make enough money to pay back its investment.

        802.11b/Wi-Fi is not really an alternative to GPRS - there is no way there will be hot spots covering the whole of a large city, which is what GPRS does today. Wi-Fi is great for use in hotspots and within businesses - the ideal is a phone or PDA that has Wi-Fi, GPRS and perhaps 3G, switching between them based on availability and cost. Nokia has already released a PC card that does Wi-Fi and GPRS, and one trend is to put GSM SIM cards (smartcards) into Wi-Fi PC Cards, enabling you to automatically bill your Wi-Fi usage to your GSM phone account.

        Finally, this camera chip is of course not dependent on GPRS, it will work fine with any wireless technology including CDMA2000. Most of what I've said above applies to CDMA, with CDMA2000 1x instead of GPRS and CDMA2000 1xEV-DO instead of W-CDMA - the only difference really is that CDMA operators have a much easier upgrade path, and don't need much spectrum, but they will probably remain in the minority world wide compared to the 70% market share of GSM globally.
        • I agree that 802.11b as it is today is not an alternative to GPRS or CDMA, but here we have Atheros [atheros.com] claiming to have a solution for 802.11a that has up to five times the range of 802.11b without violating power restrictions. The technology this is based on was called 802.11h for awhile.
          Besides, while flat out range is the easy way to compare cellular and WiFi if you're arguing from the former's perspective, it misses a key difference in the technologies that we see embodied within a mess of 802 standards: Quality of Service and Security. These latter points may be more dangerous for old school wireless providers than simple range comparisons. In 802.11e, we see Quality of Service being laid out for wireless LANs. Once you start adding QoS and 50Mbps bandwidth together with a technology that is inherently mobile the definition of LAN starts to get a bit arbitrary and leaks into MAN or WAN.
          However, you might counter that even if QoS on ad hoc wireless networks was being handled with the kind of efficiency that's currently only found on backbone switches it still couldn't become some kind of giant mesh network. Why not? Well the answer is trust. Folks aren't going to share a piece of their connection even if it means lower prices for everyone. They just don't trust each other, right? Hmm. Well sometimes that's true, but it all depends on the details.
          Enter the Dragon --no, wait it's just 802.11i and 802.1x but close enough. These bad puppies are about taking the need for trust out of the picture by securing up these protocols.
          Fantasy! Rubbish! It's all lies! I hear the cynics amongst you. But you have to admit if these standards bodies have already been formed at the IEEE, then somebody is taking this seriously.
          Sure, for now GPRS and CDMA --the cell phone sustems-- are the way to go for the tiny minority who would pay that much for wireless data services. But personally I think wireless devices will take off about the time they become cheap enough that you can stream MP3s off your home server and that will have to be very very cheap probably like $10 a month for all you can eat 256K streaming downloads and I believe 802.11 standards will make it happen and the user's devices themselves will be the access points. If you think it sounds far fetched, tell it to the IEEE. And, get that resume updated!
          • I want to play some more.
            See, if a fixed wireless ISP builds out a network like this using 802.11a and say a cheap Cogent 1gbps backbone connection and they're capping the users at 256kbps which is still plenty in today's world, they could build out fast with minimal infrastructure by simply using their own subscribers as base stations. If the subscriber is limited to 256k you've got a nice chunk of trunk line a few hundred feet in every direction from every user Let's say roughly four thousand users and the bandwidth is only ten grand a month. With high enough penetration, you don't need any infrastructure at all. Compare that to a cell network. There is no comparison. The product is similar, but the technologies are fundamentally different and the costs are incomparable.
            Now, imagine this fixed wireless ISP has all these users, let's say in LA they decide to buy up four or five separate 1 Gig lines and they've got 20K or so uers. Well, eventually a lot of those users are going to be within range of the freeways. Next thing you're competing with the cell networks for freeway access using your subscriber's base stations and you don't have to pay for real estate, or cell towers or network planners or any of that crap that makes cell netowrks expensive and filled with fully employed individuals so cocksure about the future.
            But, wait! It gets better.
            Now our imaginary fixed wireless ISP is offering mobile wireless to people on the freeway for their handhelds. Let's say we're in 2004 by now and handhelds are finally worth buying. Well holy shit, this is where it gets really freaky --and I did see that whuzzisname piece where he mentioned this same idea-- the cars are mobile in a completely separate sense than radio waves, but they're mobile nonetheles. The implications are bizarre.
            Now our fixed line wireless provider who doesn't own any base stations anywhere except for the ones his users have in their homes and handheld devices is having his bandwidth carried right out of the freakin' city in a stream that is precisely defined by the freeway, but which can be tapped into by anyone next to the freeway as well. If traffic density can be guaranteed, as it often can in Los Angeles, reliable service could be carried literally hundreds of miles away.
            Ahh! But here's the catch right? There's no fucking way any one company is going to get that density.
            Touche! It doesn't have to be a single company. ISPs could allow users to cross back and forth between networks. Hey! That's why they call in the Internet. Wild stuff. But if even a quarter of the cars on the road were network access points with a thousand feet of radius we'd be seeing fairly robust networks and cellular would be for emergency use only.
  • Couple this with the previous story about Microsoft working to create a 'standard' codec for mobile phones, and you could have bad news!

    Maybe they see this market coming and want to be in the middle of it before it even starts, with there own patented video codec alongside the 'open' audio codec they are working to create.

    What are the odds that any video phone would use entirely open systems?

  • Fer Cryin' Out Loud (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cryptochrome ( 303529 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @09:47AM (#3735626) Journal
    Everytime someone suggests putting a camera in mobile phone, there's always a bunch of people who assume that it would be used for videoconferencing purposes or high-rez photography, and whine about how useless it is. Get a clue. There are very good reasons to have even a low-rez camera in your phone, some of them more useful than having a phone/PDA combo. Consider the REAL uses:

    1) How many times have you been somewhere where you REALLY wished you had a camera, but you didn't. How often did you have your mobile phone? (assuming you had one at all)

    2) Have you ever been in a situation where you would have liked to quickly relay your situation to someone, i.e. you're witnessing a crime in progress, someone ran into your car and you'd like to keep a record of the situation, you need to describe a location to someone who's familiar with the area, etc.

    3) Have you ever run out of storage on your camera, or wanted to send pictures or streaming video for live updates to something on the web?
    • uh...

      1) Very rarely, if ever.

      2) Yes, but a camera in my phone wouldn't be my first, or even second choice.

      3) Uh, nope.

      While its cool the tech sector and mad scientists everywhere are trying to put everything we'll ever use into one little box, I want them to get re-focused on the important stuff.

      First off, figure out a way I can safely put metal in a microwave. And secondly, I want my flying car damnit! I mean, its 2002 for crying out loud. Where the hell are the flying cars!?

      Blah, all in all, cute toy, but doomed I would think.

      • uh...

        1) More times than I can imagine

        2) A camera in my phone would be my first choice. The only two other things I carry are my wallet and my watch. The former doesn't have a screen and the latter is titanium and so light I can hardly feel it and I like it that way.

        I think it's as doomed as text messaging was predicted to be.

        Phillip.
        • If integratd cameras are to be all the rage, then why hasn't anyone (to my knowledge, and if I'm wrong please correct me) build a PDA with a Sony Picturebook style camera in it? I would find it many times more useful than a "phone-cam". And while they're at it, put a phone in the PDA, with just a headset jack for mic/speaker. Small device, easy enough to carry on a belt, in a pocket or a shoulder rig.
          • " If integratd cameras are to be all the rage, then why hasn't anyone (to my knowledge, and if I'm wrong please correct me) build a PDA with a Sony Picturebook style camera in it? I would find it many times more useful than a "phone-cam"."

            Like this one [sonystyle.com]? Or how about this one [theregister.co.uk]?

            "And while they're at it, put a phone in the PDA, with just a headset jack for mic/speaker."

            What, like this one [handspring.com]?

            I hope you feel suitably corrected :-)

            Phillip.
            • Cool. I hadn't (obviously) been on top of all these nifty little toys. Now if they were just popular enough to be widely available. =P

              (There isn't much to be had in local electronics shops, and I'd like to handle one before buying it)
      • Once this comes down a bit in price, and the resolution goes up, it's probably a killer app. "Hey Mom, I am on top of El Cap, take a look at this picture"

        I could sell thousands of these on a cruise ship. No film, no figuring out how to get the pictures off the digital camera and on a computer. You could even have the phone call Kodak every night and your vacation album, nicely printed and bound on the day you return. Or have them loaded onto your Tivo as a slide show you can spring on unsuspecting visitors. Or, if you really want to annoy the crap out of your aquaintances, have Kodak send them an album of your vacation pictures every week while you are on the cruise.

        Even if the normal slashdottian doesn't get it, convenience is a huge business.

    • Forget those uses, move to the more fun / paranoid / evil ...

      Investigators (pubilc and private) have access to that kind of thing already -- just costs a little more. With this sort of thing (in theory) we could see a lot of phone hacks, and people conveniently leaving their phone 'on accident' in all sorts of places.

      You want the ultimate in spyware, imagine this ad:

      Get a free Nokia video-enabled phone with 1-year service agreement. Only $19 a month for basic service!
      Get the phone, conveniently leave it somewhere you want to spy, get a few hours worth of video. Depending on where you left it, either pick it up, or call the company and notify them that the phone was stolen while you were at the mall or other public place.

      That kind of spying would be cheaper than an X-10 cam, and would work anywhere inside the phone's service area. Even at lo-res you could still get a wealth of information. Leave your phone pointing at an ATM or a POS terminal. Leave it at a bank and listen to financial information while pointing at their transaction papers. Blackmail your friends and foes by leaving the phone in a bedroom or bathroom.

      Just a thought...

    • No, there is no good reason for a low-res camera besides wankery. Let's look at your examples.

      1) How many times have you been somewhere where you REALLY wished you had a camera, but you didn't. How often did you have your mobile phone? (assuming you had one at all)

      Every time this has come up, it's been something that you actually have to see to appreciate. I'm talking something you'd like to recognize later. A 320x200 image just doesn't cut it. Some cheap-ass pinhole camera is just going to look like doodoo.

      2) Have you ever been in a situation where you would have liked to quickly relay your situation to someone, i.e. you're witnessing a crime in progress, someone ran into your car and you'd like to keep a record of the situation, you need to describe a location to someone who's familiar with the area, etc.

      Again, some tiny low-res image is just not going to help here. Furthermore, you're not going to be able to send the digital photo to 911 anyway, they're not on a cellphone. So just how would that help?

      3) Have you ever run out of storage on your camera, or wanted to send pictures or streaming video for live updates to something on the web?

      Yes, but this would be better-served by having a bluetooth module in my actual digital camera. As for streaming video, even 3G cellphones don't have enough bandwidth for that unless you are on a relatively unused cell site. If you're in LA, just forget it right now; ditto for any other urban center.

      Any digital camera with less than 640x480 resolution is nothing more than a joke. Images over 320x200 will be impractical to diaplay on a phone, or transmit over a cellular connection. You won't be able to use a cheap-ass camera with no lens worth mentioning for anything worthwhile. If you want an emergency backup camera, get the new slide-open cam from logitech, which is still crap (though 640x480 crap) But is very very small and supposedly quite durable.

      • I agree, less than VGA rez 640x480 isn't very useful for pictures (though it's adequate for video, i.e. VCDs). Said Logitech camera is actually based on technology from Smal Camera [smalcamera.com], and is also employed in the Fujifilm Axia. The tech is small enough (and fairly advanced - it has automatic saturation control so details still come through) and could be integrated into a cell phone. Sony also came up with a memory-stick using camera [dpreview.com] that was about the size of a pack of gum. Not to mention the recent X3 [foveon.com] technology which should give big improvements in color and sharpness and smaller sensors per rez, particularly for low-rez imagers which have the most trouble with color artifacts.

        In any case, the technology is already there now and will get significantly better in the near future. A tiny camera you have with you at all times can still be very useful.
        • Right, I know they're out there, especially with the new CMOS tech and whatnot, I'm just saying, if you're doing it cheap - You need a CCD and a CCD controller/decoder, and you need some way to get that data into the rest of the cellphone but you can just use a fairly high-speed serial link for that, so the complexity of your design doesn't rise THAT much. However, it most definitely does rise. You could do custom silicon if you made enough of them, and integrate the CCD decoder into one of the other chips, but I'm not sure that's cost-effective either.

          Anyway, any CCD cheap enough for these purposes is going to be crappy. It'll probably be 640x480 by now, the lower-resolution CCDs have all but died out in consumer products, and some of those are forty bucks for a USB camera, at least on a Fry's special or similar. But you really want a real lens. I hereby predict that someone will come out with a cellphone with a camera with a telescoping lens; it will be heinously expensive but well worth it. And I'm talking about a design that does not appreciably increase the size of the phone here... Must put a bound on this. If this doesn't happen within three years of those things gaining any popularity whatsoever, I will write "JERK" on one buttcheek and "CITY" on the other and take you all a picture in support of my favorite webcomic which has nothing whatsoever to do with this comment.

          Thank you.

  • Who cares about realtime.. There's so many times when I see another Dodge Neon with "Viper Series" stickers all over it with painted/flaking calipers/wheels, man.. To be able to always get pictures of those ricers and expose them to the world, well, I'd pay $2k for one of those phones.

  • "your conversation partner could get a nice real-time view of your ear"

    but only if they had eyes inside their ears. I start to worry about Michael and his friends...

  • Most new Japanese phones have cameras already (Score:3, Informative)

    by hqm ( 49964 ) on Thursday June 20, 2002 @10:09AM (#3735747)
    What is the big news here? J-Phone in Japan
    has been selling mobile phones with cameras for
    the last two years now. DoCoMo now makes its own
    line, and the J-Phones can now send short movies.
    The US is way behind in mobile phone technology,
    with a divided and hopelessly bug-ridden wireless data infrastructure, due to the greed and stupidity of the wireless carriers and the "WAP" idiocy.
  • While it is not $15, Casio has fit a black and white digital camera into a watch that can save 100 pictures, if memory serves me.

    About $250 I believe
    Casio's Camera Watch [starvingmind.net].

    -Pete
  • Well, your wife would see that you hold the phone three foot from your ear whenever she starts screaming at you.
  • They're talking about having made a cheap chip - it doesn't mention anything about including a CCD with that.

    Such things exist already - my espion digital camera cost £40 (for the whole camera - and it's about 1cm x 3cm x 5cm in size), and it's based on the ST Microelectronics STV0680 chipset [vvl.co.uk] The chipset supports 8Mb memory - up to 640x480 resolution, has USB client controller built in, will drive an LCD display, and works as a USB webcam. Basically all you need to do to make a digital camera is connect a CCD with a lens, a couple of buttons, a USB plug and a battery to it and you're done.

    This chip sounds very similar, but it hardly sounds new.
  • a friends company in NZ approached nokia nearly 7 years ago w/ the blueprints for adding a camera to the existing nokia line complete w/ empeg encoding & display for under $30NZ (that's roughly $15US), keep in mind the drop in prices since '95-'96, of course they were turned down, being ahead of their time & not americans.
    http://www.megalo.co.nz ask for jeremy
  • This thing would use up batteries like there's no tomorrow...especially if the camera was being used continuously for a video call.
    • I'm pretty sure there would be a way to turn the camera on when you want it on to save battery space...then again if they make people start wearing a chunky battery pack just to recharge the battery after every 3 minute phone call then I say forget it...
  • This past weekend I saw a demo of Sprint's new 3G technology (CDMA2000 based) in which a 3G enabled camera posted pictures taken up on a distant web server. I was able to access the web server via a laptop with a 3G PC-Card in it. It is stronger than wi-fi (3G is available anywhere a cell phone is) and it is almost as fast as wi-fi.

    The Sprint people indicated that the capacity would increase in the year that followed to make 3G a great alternative technology. I espcially liked the idea of broadband to PDA/Phone. Wireless networking isn't supposed to make me excited (I run a wifi for my apartment building) but this demo was done in the middle of a parking lot that was surrounded by fields! Now the people of Lenexa, KS can finally surf the web while driving the combines. Isn't that what technology is about?

    More web-surfing and less using it to make the US a police state.
  • Contrary to some comments to this article, I would say that cameras in mobile phones is an absolute lifestyle MUST-HAVE.

    I mean, it's one thing hanging out on a beach on Ko Tao and just *calling* your friends back home in the drizzle - you only get to tell them how nice it is.

    But if you can give them a vidio-pan of your surroundings at the same time, the whole undertaking acquires an actual point ...

    "Bert ... check this out!" [pans camera]

    Bert: "Uh ..." [sound of jaw dropping]
    "Wait! Who was that?!"

    "Oh, just the beach bunnies who bring the drinks. They're always dressed like that."

    Bert: "Uh ... I wouldn't call that dressed, exactly."

    "Anyway, I just wanted to say that I'm having a great time, and that I wish you could be here too."

    Bert: "You got that bloody right, mate."

    Yes ... I've got to get one of these ...
  • Comes from Israel, damn cheap jews ...

    *rimshot*

    I kid, I kid! A little John Stewart humor there for ya

    Even after reading the comments and the story and a other stories just like this, I don't understand why I want a camera on my cellphone, and also since I pay for data access by the meg, I dunno if I wanna pay for one either. Now, the camera on the palm is a good idea, but id rather just have a digital camera with a microdrive.
  • This seems like it would be much more entertaining... I've always wanted to attach position fixes to my photos. Think of the possibilities! Your photo albums could then have a map interface where you could click on all of your vacation spots to call up the pictures you took from there.

    Better yet, everyone could upload to a big photo database somewhere. Then if you wanted pictures of the grand canyon, you could go to the site and call of every picture people took on archive.

    It would probably be pretty easy to do this now if you simply kept a GPS log of your travels and correlated the positions with the timestamps on your camera pictures. Any projects to do anything like this yet? :)
  • so with auto answer on your phone it would pick up and whom ever is on the other end can see what your doing...say the phone was on the night stand when yer a bit busy with sex or in the bathroom with ya on the John...ewwww...no thanks...
    what if it has auto call back..unnghh...

    Hey heres a thought...are they going to make cameras that go through your retinas so the voices in your head have sight too? (refering to the last cell phone article about inserting a cell phone device in teeth)
  • Now people can talk on their phone while driving *AND* take a picture of me flipping them off for doing so!
  • What kind of phone call would require a real-time view of your rear?

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