The Nokia 7650 Cell Phone w/ Integrated Camera

Unstrung writes "Nokia has just started shipping, in Europe, its first mobile phone with a digital camera onboard, unleashing on the unsuspecting continent a device with roughly the same mischief-making potential as the office photocopier - but in a package you can take to the bar on a Friday night." It's 640x480, and doesn't look clunky. In short, me want.

Re:The Future Of Journalism

[brianvan]

This has already happened. Many really major, really spontaneous news events are now caught by amateur photographers, tourists, or anyone who happened to be in range of any kind of camera as a news event was breaking nearby.

I think of the Concorde crash in France, for which most of the really spectacular (albeit morbid) images of the event were captured by people passing by in cars. By the time the professionals got there, they managed to capture the "huge blackened crater" shots that are all we see from most plane crashes. (I do not mean to minimalize the loss of life from this event - plane crashes are very tragic and horrific in nature. I know, because I had to attend a closed casket funeral for a personal role model as a result of one)

The World Trade Center disaster pretty much cemented this phenomenon. As a direct witness of that horror, I think it was very important that there were hundreds of thousands of still and video images taken from countless angles of the destruction of the Twin Towers. This was a disaster affecting many people, and it was quite symbolic that the disaster was witnessed, captured, and expressed by common people through modern photography - alongside the shots that the major news groups and nearby professionals obtained.

Photography is expression, and group expression can be a powerful thing. The proliferation of cameras throughout the world - with all combinations of small, cheap, fast, disposable, easy to use, flexible, high quality, and accurate - is something that contributes to humanity much in the way the printing press did. Or as we hope the Internet does.

There will still be room for professionals. For one thing, we don't want random tourists in the White House or at the Kremlin to take pictures of important meetings and speeches. Also, we don't want the only pics of someone's 74th home run coming from a 640x480 cellphone shot. Finally, future brides-to-be will probably not let you cheap out and have Uncle Mort take the wedding pics.

(I can see Rob Malda talking in a whiny voice: "But Kathleen, honey, it's a 4 megapixel! And it has a timer! Please?")

Re:can someone please explain underlying technlogy

[Daniel_E]

Tripple band and tripple mode are two different things. In Europe we generally don't have multi-mode phones because the only network available is GSM. Eventually UMTS will become available, but the current downturn in the economy has put the brakes on that development.

UMTS is the new WCDMA-based 3G network in Europe, with many similarities to the Japanese 3G network (which is already operational).

In the US you have multiple networks: AMPS, D-AMPS, GSM, CDMA-2000. A tripple-mode phone probably supports AMPS, D-AMPS and CDMA-2000.

The SMS and MMS "protocols" are well specified, making it possible to pass data between different handsets. Both SMS and MMS were developed for GSM networks as far as I know. I don't know if they are available in other networks, and if they can cross network boundaries.

Re:can someone please explain underlying technlogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Daniel is on the money, with the exception that the UMTS breaks are on. =)

I'm a SW development manager at a very large data/telecom equipment provider (think top 5) and the UMTS market is going on hot and heavy for those vendors that are still in the wireless market. In fact it is one of the only areas that is experiencing some internal expansion given the current status of the sector overall.

To answer some of your questions, there are well defined sets of standards (typically ITU-T for Europe) for the underlying protocols between the mobile, the radio, and the core networks which eventually connect to a PSTN. Vendors strive to both define and comply to these standards. In a multivendor network there are seemingly endless interoperability tests that occur prior to bringing the network online. Once the network becomes available, the operator will typically push a preferred selection of mobiles that have been proven to work in their network.

If you're interested in some of the details, I'd suggest browsing around the ITU-T website. They publish the standards that outline GSM, GPRS and UMTS technologies. In particular the H-series covers Audio visual and Multimedia systems, unfortunately the standards cost $$$.
Check it out here: http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/