Mobile news, various

• Cameraphones quality and intended audiences - Tom Hume says: "the important thing is that images produced by phones look good on other phones, not that they produce high quality media", but we reckon that photos taken on camphones will need to be just good enough to cover all casual/impulse use, and the market for camera-only devices will become higher-end. Also: his interesting comments on bluejacking
• How Nintendo almost beat Nokia to the gamephone - they had no equipment manufacturer. So perhaps not a problem for TTPCom's B'ngo? (TTP make handsets, silicon etc for most people except Nokia)
• Presence, privacy and mobiles: Rheingold on Location-aware devices, privacy, and UI design ("the same technology that could let you know if a good Chinese restaurant or old friend is in the vicinity could also betray your location to a totalitarian government, neighborhood spammers, and your vindictive ex-spouse") and Presence. Also: Dodgeball's concept of circles and scouts.
• Handset sales could reach 0.5bn in 2003, up 22% on 2002
• Symbian dater - share pictures, voice and video via Bluetooth [via antimega]
• Octothorpe: the story of the hash, pound, gate, square key on your phone [via metafilter]
• DoCoMo testing dual mode 3G/WLAN handsets - cf also Calypso Wireless' efforts

Comments

[Struan]

On a point related to the camphone quality, photography pundit Thom Hogan thinks camphones will kill the low end digital camera market: http://bythom.com/2004predictions.htm (about 3/4 of the way through). By low end he means anything with less than a 3 megapixel resolution.

[rodcorp]

Ah, hail the magnificent Stru.

Agree with Thom's predictions (worth a read), and would not be at all suprised to hear that Nokia, Sharp and Samsung are already the leading digital camera companies by low-end units shipped, but can't find any stats on that yet.

However, two possible caveats:

(1) good cams in phones are possibly opening up new user behaviour (and therefore a "market" in a very broad sense) rather than stealing marketshare from lower-end cameras. For many people, it's not that they're leaving their camera at home these days because their sparky new phonecam now does the job - in fact they never carried a camera with them daily anyway (and perhaps this is what TomHume is implying)

(2) "low end" may be redefined as something better featured than <=3megap in 3 years time, which may keep "low-end" ahead of mobiles. For a while.

[Gary Cliffe]

Hi Rod

Can't find contact info anywhere but am interested in your walk lines work for the Underground map - I am involved at a strategic level in London walking matters - has your work been developed and where is the base data from? etc. etc.

Get in touch!

cheers

Gary