If we’re not careful, imaging could fade to a niche application in phones. Some think it’s happening already.

Or so said Kodak Chief Executive Dan Carp during a keynote address at the CTIA wireless show on March 14th.

Aloha Dan. Of course camera phones suck right now! Friggin’ current state of the art in camera phones is 1998 in stand-alone digital camera years. Like that’s so 640×480. But no worries, pretty soon you’ll be able to purchase a seven megapixel camera phone. And I am sure that users complain about the ease difficultly of use, but that’ll be fixed too. Probably not anytime soon, but eventually.

Dan, this I do know; camera phones are gonna suck less this year and the next and the next, so that pretty soon they’re not gonna suck. Combine this with with the fact that humans inherently visual creatures and you won’t ever have a “niche application.”

P.S. Also in the News.com article linked to above is this:

Last year, 180 million camera phones were sold worldwide, a 130 percent increase over 2003. Most analysts believe the growth will continue, with about 280 million camera phones sold by the end of the year, and there may be one billion camera phones in circulation by year’s end.

ONE BILLION camera phones. Deeeaaamn. Far from being a niche application, imaging via phones is about to explode. Think about how that will effect societies and politics… especially local politics (just go take some pictures of the potholes in your neighborhood and send them to your local representative).

I’ve been thinking a long time about upgrading my old Nokia 8265 mobile to something a little more modern. The 8265 is a TDMA phone that runs on AT&T Wireless Service’s network (now part of Cingular). Cingular is moving to an all GSM network, so folks with TDMA phones will be orphaned at some point. That point for me was a couple of months ago when the TDMA service in my area began acting really flaky… dropping calls all the time, service disappearing from areas, etc. This finally convinced me to upgrade both my phone and service.

My criteria for the new phone included: a “candy bar” form factor (as opposed to a flip phone), no external antenna (ruling out Verizon), internet capability and a size approximately equal to the 8265. My preference would have been to stick with Nokia, since my 8265 has served me well over the past four years or so (including numerous hard drops onto hard surfaces). However, all of the current Nokia phones are either two large and/or just plain ugly. Pretty much the only phone that met my criteria was the Audiovox SMT5600.
Read the rest of this entry »