I predict that camera phones will be a thing that my kids ask me about in ten years, as in, "daddy, what did people do before camera phones when they wanted to take a picture?"
"Well kids, we had to carry around a separate camera, you know, like a professional photographer's digital camera, except not as nice"
"so you carried a separate camera around all the time?"
"no, only on special occasions"
"what if you didn't know something was going to happen that you wanted a picture of"
etc. this will be one of those "seems like a simple thing now" evolutions that will really change everyday behavior in interesting ways.
ps, how lame is the Sprint "i see my grandmother in the pancake" ad? yeah, that's why you want a camera phone...because you're at the diner and you see grandma's face in the pancake....how stupid..... Sprint should fire their creative agency for that ad alone. how about an ad where a teen is at mardi gras, and is talking to his friend in chicago, and he's on bourbon street and things are getting out of hand, and so on......or how about an ad where two kids are at a royals game and dad takes a picture of the two kids with his phone and emails it to grandfather on the fly with "we're in right field, turn on the game". or whatever. ok, it's midnight in chicago and i just came up with 2 far superior use cases that are a lot more "fun" and would make for more engaging ads than "hey, i see grandma's face in my pancake".....morons run much of the creative world, as we've learned from prime time tv.
Posted by Dick at July 31, 2003 11:45 PMnow that my wife and i both have camera phones, i'm actually quite amazed how much we use them as a replacement for being in the same place at the same time. i get a few MMSes a week now from random stores with "should i buy this one or this one?". actually she calls me, tells me she is going to send the pictures and then sends 2 MMSes in that situation. phones are also a lot more stealth than cameras. you can take pictures where you might get looked at strangely with a camera.
Posted by: Steve Olechowski at August 1, 2003 01:05 AMit's true that in the US, you can still take pictures with a camphone without really being noticed, but as the european and japanese "upskirt" community has so ably demonstrated/agitated, society eventually catches up. amerkuns just don't know to look for someone using a camphone. yet.
Posted by: matt shobe at August 1, 2003 10:36 AM