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The Camera-phone FAQ
1. General questions about Camera phones
1.1 What are camera phones?
Camera phones are mobile phones with an in-built digital camera (typically a CCD or CMOS camera).
When a camera phone is switched to the camera mode, the display
of the mobile phone acts as a the view-finder of the camera, and one of the buttons of the
mobile phone is the trigger. Some camera phones have a built-in
flash. After taking the picture, it can be stored in the internal memory of
the mobile handset, it can be stored on removable media (memory cards),
it can be sent by email to another mobile phone or to a PC,
or it can be stored in a server in a private photo album.
Return to Camera-phone FAQ main page
1.2 Which was the first camera phone? When and where was it introduced?
The first camera phone (J-SH04) was manufactured by SHARP in Japan for J-Phone and
was introduced in December 2000 in Japan.
Return to Camera-phone FAQ main page
1.3 What is "sha-mail"?
"Sha-mail" literally means "Picture-mail".
Sha-mail is J-Phone's (now Vodafone's) service to take pictures with
camera phones and send these photographs via J-Phone's email services to other
mobile users or to PCs linked to the internet. Sha-mail services were introduced
in December 2000.
Return to Camera-phone FAQ main page
1.4 How do photographs taken by camera phones look like?
Examples of pictures taken by low-end camera phones
Today's top range camera phones have up to 2 Megapixel cameras built-in (as an example, DoCoMo's D505iS can take pictures
up to 1224 x 1632 pixel = 2 Megapixel)
Sha-mail was introduced by J-Phone and SHARP in Japan from December 2000. In June 2002 about 40% of
J-Phone's subscribers had sha-mail enabled handsets, therefore there were about
5 million camera phone users for J-Phone alone. Adding up the camera phone users for
all Japanese mobile phone carriers, we estimate that the number of camera phone users
in Japan was around 10 million during 2002. We estimate
that in December 2003 there were around 30 million Japanese camera phone users.
Return to Camera-phone FAQ main page
1.6 Which carriers offer camera phones and associated services in Japan?
J-phone (now: Vodafone), KDDI/AU, NTT-DoCoMo, Tsu-ka all offer camera phones, some with movie function, both for 2G and 3G (Tsuka 2G only). Return to Camera-phone FAQ main page
