The heartwarming story of how Borland founder Philippe Kahn invented the camera phone in a hospital room while his wife was having a baby is being put under the microscope by C/Net’s editor, Michael Kanellos, who claims it’s not quite accurate, and that Kahn was “not the first person to cross-breed the digital camera and the cell phone”.
“This part is true, Kahn’s wife did have a baby in January 1997 and Kahn did rig up all that stuff and post pictures to a Web site.
Kahn formed a new company, LightSurf, to build and market PictureMail – a back-end system that would let a cell phone take a photo and send it somewhere.The experiment eventually led to LightSurf, which he sold for $270 million to VeriSign in 2005. The first version came out in Japan in 1999, helping spur the Japanese to make the earliest cell-cams. Motorola and Nokia ended up being late to the cell-cam game.
But earlier, in 1994, Olympus released a camera called the Deltis VC-1100, which contained built-in functionality that let users upload digital photos over cellular and analog phone lines.
The first commercial camera phone complete with infrastructure was the J-SH04, made by Sharp Corporation, had an integrated CCD (charge-coupled device) sensor, with the Sha-Mail (Picture-Mail in Japanese) infrastructure developed in collaboration with Kahn’s LightSurf venture, and marketed by J-Phone in Japan today owned by Softbank. The first commercial deployment in North America of camera phones was in 2002. The Sprint wireless carriers deployed over 1 million camera phone manufactured by Sanyo and launched by the PictureMail infrastructure (Sha-Mail in English) developed and managed by LightSurf.
Major manufacturers of camera phones include Toshiba, Sharp, Nokia, Sanyo, Samsung, Motorola, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, and LG Electronics.
Major manufacturers of cameras for cell phones include Toshiba, ST Micro, Sharp, Omnivision, Aptina and Magnachip.
(Courtesy: picturephoning.com,wikipedia.com)
Ajith,
Nice Post