Satoshi's Brief history of camera phones
Via Brainstorms and Raves

See also: Moblogging for the Masses

Everyone looking at his/hers mobile phone and moblogging ;)

(Picture from Zak's beta blog)

Great article about the Mobile market from IHT: Vodafone pulls ahead in data race

"Vodafone Live puts a great message on top of weak services," she said in a recent research note, while a competitor, i-mode from NTT DoCoMo Inc., had the opposite problem, getting the services right and the marketing wrong. She said that only conversational content services - those that blend communication, which consumers are willing to pay for, with content that they expect to be cheap or free - can deliver.

"Providers must enhance existing content to make it conversational," de Lussanet said. "For instance, they could enrich weather services with the capability to distribute weather maps to friends, with an invitation to a picnic or a warning to drive safely in the fog, attached."

Via Russ

Camera phone stats from Business 2.0 column
Since January, T-Mobile users have sent more than 1 million photos to one another. Sprint PCS (PCS) president Len Lauer recently said that camera phone owners send an average of 15 pictures a month.

And here is the article: Camera Phones Send a Pretty Picture.

Via Werbach

Update (2003-06-16): ZDNet Mobile Japan writes about the new J-SH53. See the image samples below.

Via Melody:
May 23, 2003
Mega-Pixel
A image taken with a mega-pixel cell-phone digital camera recently released.
http://www.zdnet.co.jp/mobile/0305/22/l_maga1.jpg

***

Megapixel camera phone to go on sale

Japan's J-Phone says that the J-SH53 by Sharp, which comes with a built-in CCD mobile camera capable of photographing 1 million effective pixels, will be available in stores from May 22nd, making it the world's first true megapixel-class mobile handset to be commercially available.

It isn't available yet at the J-Phone Online Shop though. Also, I only did find announcements for it so far on the Sharp as well as on the J-Phone site.

Anyway, more on the characteristics of the J-SH53 in english here.

For a funky japanese demo click this or go to the J-SH53 subsite for an overview.

"The J-SH53 may not be in the average tokyoites price range but in the end you get what you pay for (20,000yen - 30,000yen.)", according to x.

This is approximatively between 150 and 220 Euro, or 220 and 330 Swiss Francs. Which looks rather cheap to me.

Via Emily

As we are working towards are new moblog...

Appreciate Kurt's beautiful Moblog in the meantime.

and read:

Technosocial Situations, Emergent Structurings of Mobile Email Use

also found via Easterwood

Via Mobile Media Japan:

In a confusing move, US-based MPEG LA, LLC, which manages the collective MPEG related patents for the MPEG-4 visual compression standard, delivered a 47-page agreement (in English) to befuddled Japanese content providers laying out new terms for paying royalties on video download content formatted in MPEG-4. [...] Japanese content providers were shocked to read MPEG LA could ask them to pay from 25 cents per user up to US$1,000,000 per year, depending on the volume and manner in which users download content. Japanese content providers have been given 30 days to sign the agreement in order to take advantage of an "early bird" special that waives royalties until the end of 2003. Some say Japan's budding video-download market won't bear the high royalities, which will either erase profits or drive up content costs. The development risks driving content companies away from download services that use MPEG-4, or toward other compression formats such as Office Noa's "Nancy" video codec (used by J-Phone) or other alternatives.

Well, it seems the MPEG-LA is again - remember the Quicktime 6 case - messing it up.

Instead of supporting the companies who are using MPEG-4 and which are sometimes, like KDDI, even MPEG-4 patent holders, they just do the opposite. Do they feel so secure that everybody will converge to MPEG-4? There are other competing formats around - to name but Windows Media ...