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The Camera-phone FAQ
2. Camera phones: the user perspective
2.1 How are camera phones used?
People use camera phones both as phones and also as simple digital cameras to
take pictures for their own personal use. Pictures are
either stored in the camera, or maybe used as a screen saver, or the
user can load the pictures into a personal digital album on a subscription
basis from a service provider. In addition to keeping pictures as a personal
memory, pictures taken by camera phones can also be sent by email to others.
In addition, most recent camera phones in Japan have removable storage media (memory
card). Users can store photographs in these memory cards and transfer them
to a PC.
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2.2 How do users take pictures with camera phones?
The camera is usually on the opposite side of the display of the mobile phone
handset. When taking a picture, the user first switches the handset to camera mode.
In camera mode, the display of the handset acts as a view finder and shows the
image from the built-in camera. Pressing the designated button on the mobile phone
stores the image into the handsets memory. In recent cameras, the user has the opportunity
to process the image in various ways, such as superimposing graphics, or editing the
picture. Some phones have two inbuilt cameras with same or different resolution.
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2.3 How are camera phone images sent to other users?
Users have the choice of sending camera phone images to other mobile phone handsets, or
by normal internet email to any PC based email address on the internet.
When images are sent to other mobile phone handsets, the image is normally stored on
the mobile phone carriers server, and the URL where the picture can be found is
forwarded by an email to the recipient's handset. The recipient clicks on the
URL and the handset then displays the image. The image can then be stored by
the recipient as a screen copy, or as a screen saver. In the case of sending the
image to a PC via ordinary internet email, the images are usually sent as
jpg attachments to the email. For some more advanced handsets, the sender can
select different methods of encoding (e.g. jpg, ...) the image, and can select high
compression or low compression, can change the size of the image, or can edit the image in other ways.
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2.4 Can users store images in the handset?
Yes, handsets typically have between 500kbyte and 2 Megabyte inbuilt memory,
which allows the storage of typically 100 or more pictures depending on
the compression ratio (quality) and size of idividual images. Most recent
handsets also have removable memory cards (e.g. 128 Mbyte memory cards), which
allow the transfer of images to PCs or printing machines.
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2.5 Are there location dependent services?
Yes. For both KDDI/AU as well as J-Phone, the position of the mobile phone
is determined by triangulation, and normally the position where in Japan
the image is taken is also registered in memory, provided the handset is
within the range of radio towers. The precision of the location is within
a few 100 meters. In some cases it is also possible to send the location
together with the image in an email. A number of KDDI/AU phones also have
GPS (satelite based position determination) built into the camera phones,
so that a photograph can be linked to a precise determination of the position.
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