Letting Camera Phone Users Off The Hook

Tony Henning has written a very interesting article in Forbes on how US subscribers are not going to be able to take full advantage of the new higher-resolution camera phones simply because wireless operators won't let them--not because of technical limitations.

"It strikes us extremely shortsighted for the carriers to subsidize phones that don't let users get their pictures off the phones any other way.

What the operators should be doing instead is trying to find new ways to profit from camera-phone pictures. If the carriers aren't maximizing the revenue they can make by letting consumers do anything they want with the pictures these camera phones can produce, then why on Earth are they letting us pay just $150 for a phone that costs $500 or more to make?

There are lots of lessons to be learned along these lines from markets outside the United States. In Japan, for instance, they have camera phones with 2 and 3 megapixels that produce shots that use at least 500 kilobytes of memory. Customers can't send these photos over the air because the Japanese wireless networks have imposed a 100k to 200k limit on e-mail attachments, which is how picture messaging is done there. That's a problem, but users can remove a phone's memory card and upload pictures to a computer or to a printing kiosk. Their handsets are equipped with infrared ports that let them beam pictures to other devices. Phones there are frequently even shipped with cords or cradles that can connect directly to a computer.

In the U.S., wireless companies don't want to support phones with removable memory or make it easy to connect a camera phone to a PC because they don't want subscribers to bypass the network. Indeed, while some new handsets hitting the market have Bluetooth short-range wireless technology built in, manufacturers that supply phones to U.S. carriers have disabled the ability to use Bluetooth to transfer pictures from the phone.

Consumers haven't noticed that they're being shortchanged, primarily because no one's told them that camera phones can take pictures worth saving--and printing. But that's not going to be the case for too much longer, so carriers need to get their act together.

When camera phones deliver pictures that rival those from cameras, people are going to start snapping shots they want to save."

emily | 4:58 PM | Reports |
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