Camera phones - from the Intellect to the Tsunami

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.

Although there have been landline based video phones for a number of decades, the first cell phone to be able to transmit, receive, and display digital images was a prototype device called the Intellect, which was designed in 1993 by the American inventor Daniel A. Henderson. The Intellect was, in essence, a hand held mobile phone with a large, high resolution monochrome screen, that was able to display images and video files that had been transmitted by a computer connected to a wireless transmitter. Many of the technologies and data transfer protocols that were pioneered by Henderson are still in use today, in our modern camera phones.

There were several other early attempts to combine cell phone technology with digital image capture and transmission, including the Apple Videophone/PDA, launched in 1995, and several concept cameraphones for show purposes only developed by Kodak and Olympus around the same time. None of these could connect to the internet, however, which made them unable to share pictures quickly and easily with other users.

However, it was not long before some bright spark, namely Philippe Kahn of Lightsurf enterprises in the US, invented a mobile picture sharing structure, and the first cameraphone to make use of this was the Sharp J-SH04, which was developed in the late nineties and received a commercial release in 2001 in Japan.

Needless to say, the camera phone was to prove a huge success, and by 2006, over half of all the mobile phones in circulation were cameraphones, which spelled the end for two of the worlds leading camera makers, Minolta and Konica.

By the beginning of 2009, there were over two billion camera phones in circulation worldwide.

Cameraphone footage has even started to be shown on TV, as their ubiquity allows citizen bystanders to film major events as they happen, rather than waiting for a professional camera crew to turn up. The Boxing Day Tsunami of 2005 was the first example of a major world news event where the majority of the breaking news footage shown on television was filmed by citizens using camera phones, rather than by professional crews.

This is expected to become a more common occurrence as time goes on and cameraphones become even more ubiquitous.

Vodafone stock a great range of mobiles if you are looking to upgrade, or sim cards if you already have your phone of choice.