Sony Ericsson Fanboy

Over the past few years, the development of mobile handset’s technology has gone to a different level. It is proven with the presence of cameras in almost all of mobile handsets we’ve seen lately. But it seems that the Swedish-Japanese manufacturer have a new and different point of view. Instead of attaching cameras into handsets, they started to try to put handset functionalities into cameras.

Not to make them into a phones, but to provide modern cameras with the same data connectivity options that even the simplest camera in mobile handset has.

Wouldn’t that be a good idea?

Sony Ericsson apparently thinks so and has no less then four patent applications to prove it.

The idea is simple:

• put a wireless card/adapter inside a digital camera or into a separate wireless adapter, capable of connecting to any available wireless network, including GSM, CDMA, Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, Bluetooth, etc;
• dedicate some flash memory for storing the settings to various external services like Flickr, Picasa or Blogger and devices like PCs, printers or network connected TVs.
• add some software code for different usage scenarios, and tweaking/configuration/action options.

That’s it. With the help of Moore’s law, expanding mobile data network capacities, dropping data transfer rates and a little software magic, you might not have to worry about the full memory cards in your camera, or the necessity to remember to download your pictures from camera to your PC soon.

Your camera may be able to do that automatically, almost anywhere and almost anytime you take a new picture. And even put all the pictures and videos in the right place with a single push of the shutter button.

Of course, that’s a little bit of exaggeration for now. But, despite a very real possibility that cameraphones will soon completely displace digital still/point-and-shoot cameras, the higher end imaging devices like DSLRs, prosumer quality video cameras, etc; would not be subsumed by the wireless gadget makers anytime soon.

However, there’s no reason for the capabilities provided by seamless wireless connectivity not be available to all imaging devices around. And the success of the products such as Eye-Fi clearly shows that there is a real demand for a well implemented wireless connection there.

I’m not really sure how well patentable the ideas described in Sony Ericsson’s applications are, but it’s good to see that one of the biggest camera and phone vendors is seriously thinking about these issues.

Via: Unwiredview

written by sefanboy \\ tags: Innovation, Patents