Lights, 8 Megapixel Camera, Action!

Samsung recently announced exclusive deals for its 8 Megapixel Camera phone Innov8 (Innovate ;) a.k.a. Samsung i8510 or GT-i8510.

Its a 3.5G Symbian smartphone with an 8 megapixel camera, WiFi and GPS, plus an advanced multimedia player and a whole host of other features that compete head on with the Nokia N96 and N95 8GB. The "8" in "Innov8" refers to the i8510's advanced 8 megapixel camera. This has autofocus and a dual LED flash, plus an image stabiliser, panoramic stitching, face detection and a number of other clever features lifted straight out of Samsung's dedicated digital camera range. Sometimes we have seen disappointing video capture quality with some rival phones, but not so with the Innov8 which is capable of recording VGA resolution video at 30 frames per second, or QVGA resolution at 120 frames per second. The Innov8 also has built-in video editing and an FM radio with RDS, plus stereo Bluetooth and a 3.5mm audio output socket.

More features, pictures, etc in Mobile Gazette website.

Note that Samsung has previously already released 10 Megapixel camera with 3x Optical zoom. The SCH-B600 was shown off in CeBit in 2006. Dont know if it was launched in Europe anywhere.

Reiter's Camera Phone report has some interesting statistics on Camera phones. One of the interesting bit of information was summary of Ofcom communication Market report 2007. Based on that 84% of the phones sold in UK now have camera and 38% of people surveyed said that they use their mobile camera regularly. Another article mentions that 40% of Japanese print camera phone photos. More Interesting bits on Reiter's camera phone report.

There is another set of statistics from wirefly.com (via Click Chic) for US:

• 63.8 percent of users ages 18-30 say they use their cell phone’s camera at least once a week, while 26.3 percent reported using it daily
• “Family events” and “scenery/sightseeing” remain the top reasons cited for using a camera phone, but social uses separated the younger adults from the over-30 crowd - 58.3 percent of cell phone users ages 18-30 report using a cell phone regularly “to document nightlife,” while just 29.9 percent of those over 30 made a similar claim.
• individuals ages 18-30 use their camera phones to publish photos to online social media four times as much as respondents over 30 years of age.
• 96.3 percent of adult cell phone owners report that they have a cell phone with a camera. (No surprise here, since most cell phones now come with a camera.)
• 19 percent of adults prefer to use their cell phone as their primary camera for all photography.
• 77.2 percent of photos taken remain stored in the phone, 45.4 percent are used as wall-paper and 38.6 percent are sent to friends via MMS.
• 20.2 percent of respondents say they have snapped a photo of an attractive man/woman, and 7.5 percent have photographed an unsuspecting stranger.
• 46.4 percent of all adults and two-thirds of adults age 18-30 say they use their cell phone to snap self-portraits.
• 19.8 percent say they have snuck a picture while pretending to do something else.

Things have changed since Nokia became the biggest Camera manufacturer. Over the last couple of years the resolution of phone cameras have improved and at the same time the quality has improved as well. The are now coming with much better equipped cameras with professional quality lens.

Martin pointed out in his post earlier that Flickr maintains live statistics of the cameras being used to upload photos. In his post in January he mentioned that Nokia N95 has just overtaken N73 but I can see that Iphone is now the leader as can be seen above.

Phone Cameras is one area that is being seriously thought about in search for Killer applications.

Things our phone will do in next 10 years

Interesting article in Cnet on "10 things your mobile will do in next 10 years"

1. Wallet: This would be quite cool when available. Have been hearing about this for years now. Apparently very popular in Japan and S.Korea where people are not using credit cards anymore and instead using Phones.

A much better idea would be to have a universal recognition kind of chip which i can use as Credit card, Smart Card for Trains (In london we have Oyester cards) and then i can use this for accessing company door, garage door , etc. This would be a real killer app but doesnt look like will happen in near (or far) future

2. Internet: In December, ABI Research said that almost 50 million people used social-networking sites on their mobile phones. That number is expected to grow to 174 million by 2011. It would be cool to be able to browse using your phone. Mosst of the sites i use (including mine) are not mobile friendly and this is the thing that is turning people off the net.

3. Location: Already too many phones supporting GPS and A-GPS. The chips are becoming cheaper with cost of around $5 so the manufacturers should have no problem. In future we will get disscounted packages where we will have to receive adverts which would be location specific. Nokia has some applications which can compete with TomTom for getting directions, etc.

4. Search: Hardly anything needs to be mentioned for this.

5. TV: Have written enough on Mobile TV already. IMS Research forecasts that by 2011 there will be more than 30 million mobile TV subscribers in the United States. The firm also predicts that almost 70 million handsets capable of receiving mobile TV will be shipped in the U.S. in 2011.

6. Simplified surfing: From the Cnet article

Ever notice how many clicks it takes to find the one thing you're looking for on your phone? It's worse than counting how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop. But handset makers and mobile operators are
hard at work trying to make phones easier to navigate and simpler to use.

The upcoming iPhone from Apple is a perfect example of how user interfaces will be improved. Apple fans are confident that the company has come up with another slick and intuitive
design, just as it did for the iPod.

One aspect of the iPhone's interface that has been publicized is its use of sensory technology to detect when the device is rotated. This allows the phone to automatically render pictures on the screen in portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal) format. That allows the user to determine which format is best for viewing whatever is on the screen, be
it a Web page, video, or photo.

In the future, motion-sensing technology, similar to that used in the Nintendo Wii game console, will also allow people to navigate their cell phone menus or the mobile Internet
with a flick of their wrists.

But motion sensing is just one piece of the puzzle. Operators such as Verizon Wireless are redesigning their content menus
to reduce the number of clicks users must endure to find what they want. Ryan Hughes, vice president of digital media programming for Verizon Wireless, said he believes that user interfaces will be customizable so that users can decide
for themselves which applications will be displayed on their phones most prominently.

Motorola is already offering a customizable interface on the
Razr 2, which the company claims will make searching for contacts, accessing applications, and messaging much easier.

7. Brainier radios: Maybe in future SDRs (Software Defined Radios) may become more common and popular and yes the technology will become feasible. Also multiple radios on the chpset would mean Handovers will be possible from 3G to WiMax, Wifi, etc.

8. Personal Cell: Everyone seems to be talking of Femtocell. Where we will have a small 3G base station in our home. We could use it for Voice or High Speed data. No need for the POTS and use mobile for everything. This will still take some time as the operators dont fully understand the benefits of offering cheap data.

9. Perfect Camera: Today roughly 41 percent of American households own a camera phone. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to buy a phone today that doesn't have a camera. By 2010 more than 1 billion mobile phones in the world will ship with an embedded camera, up from the 589 million camera phones that are expected to be sold in 2007, according to market research firm Gartner.

10. More music on the phone: Mobile phone users around the globe are expected to spend $32.2 billion on music for their handsets by 2010, up from $13.7 billion in 2007, according to Gartner. This can only happen when Music Video/Audio becomes cheaper though. Personally i would prefer listening to FM Radio rather than music but i am not sure how much demand there would be and ofcourse the operators dont gain anything.