Revitalizing the camera phone

Recently made phones are almost guaranteed to have a low-grade camera installed. Camera phones are full of pictures of our pets, relatives posing in front of statues and friends grinning stupidly in bars. But do these pictures ever make it out of our camera phones? No. That's according to David Wright, president of Avanquest Software's OEM division. In fact, taking a photo with a camera phone is almost a futile action. Chances are it will never be viewed again, except for the moment its taker decides to erase it to free up storage space for even more photos.

People simply don't use their camera phones like they do their digital cameras, Wright said. Most of the time they can't be bothered to extract their pictures from the phone, whether it's through synchronization to a PC or attaching it to an e-mail sent from their phone. And even when they do bother, picture quality is nothing to write home about, further discouraging them from keeping the pictures they take, he said.

That's a source of frustration for Avanquest, which has built its OEM software business entirely on the premise of getting those photos off the phone. Its Mobile Phone Tools PC application is bundled with Motorola's camera phones. The whole point of its software is to synchronize the camera with the PC, off-loading those photos onto a network where they can be manipulated, shared and even printed.

Avanquest's latest application, however, is targeted not at the vendor but at the carrier. SendPhotos Mobile is a phone client that automatically uploads any photo taken over the cellular or Wi-Fi network onto a network server, which stores and sorts the photos. The photo isn't gone from the phone forever, though. The server creates a thumbnail of each photo, which is then shipped back to the device. Those thumbnails are, in turn, used to organize the user's photo collection on the handset, allowing room for thousands of photos in memory that would normally keep less than a hundred. Any time the customer wants to see the full resolution photo, he or she only needs to pull it from the server, Wright said.

Such a technology would encourage phone manufacturers to put higher-resolution cameras in their devices without worrying about the extra cost of supplying memory to hold photos, Wright said. With higher-resolution and better-quality cameras, customers would be more likely to use photos after they are taken. Carriers would also encourage the trend because the constant server synchronization would entice customers to buy data plans and upgrade to 3G phones — the only ones powerful enough to support multi-megabyte uploads onto the network, Wright said. The trend is already happening, he said.

“More and more phones are coming with three-megapixel and four-megapixel cameras,” Wright said. “It's the reason we're doing this now instead of two years ago. We consider this the right timing to bring this technology out.”