Camera Phones - From The Intellect To The Tsunami

By Author: Neo Nashville
Total Articles: 30
Comment this article

In a nutshell, a camera phone is a mobile phone with an integral digital camera. It allows users to capture both still images and short moving sequences, store them on the phones internal memory or a removable memory card, and share them with other devices and users via a wireless internet connection.

The first mobile picture phone prototype, entitled the Intellect, was invented in 1993 by Daniel A Henderson, and now resides in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. The Intellect was a hand held cell phone with a large monochrome display that could receive and display digital picture and video data sent by a wireless transmitter, and pioneered many of the technologies and protocols that were to find their way into the modern camera phone.

During the nineties, there were several attempts to combine mobile phones with digital camera technology. Camera manufacturers Kodak and Olympus demonstrated several digital camera/mobile phone combinations at trade shows during the nineties, and Apple tried a different tack with a combined mobile videophone and PDA. Impressive as these devices were, they lacked one crucial ...
... element of the modern day cameraphone - they could not connect to the internet, and were therefore unable to quickly and easily share images with other users, without physical connection to a computer.

The first image sharing infrastructure technology was demonstrated in 1997 by Philippe Kahn of US tech firm Lightsurf enterprises, who successfully sent a picture of his newborn baby to over 2000 friends, relatives, and associates from a prototype Sharp cameraphone. This phone, the Sharp J-SH04, finally hit the shelves in Japan in 2001, and appeared in the US and European markets the following year.

The ability to take pictures and share them quickly and easily with others was one of the main selling points of the new 3G phone services, so naturally phone manufacturers were keen to include cameras with their new phones wherever possible in order to start making money from their expensive 3G licenses. By 2006, over half of all mobile phones had in built cameras, which was to prove catastrophic for the digital camera industry, forcing two of the big four manufacturers, Minolta and Konica, out of business.

Today, there are over two billion camera phones in use globally, and that figure is predicted to rise exponentially in the years to come.

Footage shot by citizen journalists on cameraphones has even started to crop up on major television news bulletins. The first major international breaking news story to use cameraphone footage in this way was the 2005 Boxing Day Tsunami.

Since then, cameraphone footage has been used increasingly regularly in news bulletins, and has become part of the defining aesthetic of our times.
Vodafone stock a great range of mobiles if you are looking to upgrade, or sim cards if you already have your phone of choice.