The Camera Phone: An Always-Available Internet Dialtone

While I think my analysis and prognostication skills are fairly refined, nobody’s perfect and I admittedly sometimes miss some key piece of the research puzzle. Take for example ‘Form-Factor Transformations‘, one of the online addendums associated with my mid-March 2007 feature article on digital imaging. One of the key image capture platforms discussed in that writeup, which I’ve been keeping a close eye on for a number of years now, is the camera-inclusive mobile phone.

Review my mid-March piece, and you’ll see that in comparing and contrasting camera phones versus stand-alone cameras, I focused on two particular analysis areas:

• Image quality (as measured by resolution, optics capabilities, light sensitivity and other factors) and trends in this regard, and
• The convenience factor of a camera integrated within the phone you already tote with you everywhere, versus the need to also carry a second device (the stand-alone camera)

While I still think that both of the above issues represent valid review criteria, I’ve subsequently realized that I overlooked one other key one: connectivity. Although I’ve used camera-inclusive mobile phones for several years now (an Audiovox SMT5600, followed by an iMate SP5m and then a T-Mobile Dash), the imaging subsystems’ capture resolutions were insufficient to deliver meaningful results. And as you may have already noticed, all three phones ran variants of the Windows Mobile operating system, which hasn’t historically been very intuitive or user-friendly, especially for non-business-oriented applications.

Everything changed a few months ago when I bought, jail-broke and carrier-unlocked (for use with T-Mobile) an Apple iPhone 3G. For one thing, the iPhone 3G’s camera delivers 2 Mpixels of resolution; the follow-on iPhone 3GS further ups the ante to 3 Mpixels. Also, the iPhone’s OS X-based operating system and application suite make subsequent usage of captured images a straightforward task. And, particularly germane to the topic of this post, the iPhone 3G’s built-in cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity options easily enable me to share my pictures with others.

Is a pet doing something cute, or a deer strolling past my door? I can snap a shot and email it to a friend. Has my garage construction project reached some particularly momentous milestone? Up to Facebook goes a visual archive of the achievement, to share with all my ‘Friends’. No hassle, no fuss, no sync with a computer required; a couple of touchscreen presses and I’m good to go. The Eye-fi folks tap into the same sentiment via Wi-Fi-inclusive SD memory cards, but in a less straightforward fashion, and at incremental expense.

Here’s the irony: my prior three Windows Smartphones also had built-in IEEE 802.11 and cellular connectivity, the latter GPRS-only on the SMT5600 but of the faster EDGE flavor on the SP5m and Dash. And, because I’m using my iPhone 3G on T-Mobile’s network, but the hardware doesn’t support T-Mobile’s 3G frequencies, I’m stuck with EDGE transfer rates here, too. So clearly connectivity by itself isn’t sufficient to ensure application (and therefore product) success. But I still feel it’s a critical element in the equation.

As such, I’m much less compelled by the camera built into Apple’s latest iteration of the iPod nano family. For one thing, it’s video-only; the available space defined by the product thickness and other form factor dimensions was reportedly insufficient to deliver still image capture quality deemed acceptable by the powers that be inside the company. And because the iPod nano (unlike, say, Microsoft’s Zune series or Sandisk’s regretfully dead Sansa Connect) doesn’t embed wireless connectivity, you need to USB-tether the device to a computer in order to get the video clips off it and do anything meaningful with them (save natively play them back, of course).

I’m curious: how critical do you think built-in, brain-dead easy wireless connectivity is to product success, both now and in the future, and to what degree is this need application-dependent?