Windows Mobile & Wireless Photography
July 30th, 2006 Jason Dunn
My post the other day about Pocket Phojo got me thinking about a post I made to Pocket PC Thoughts back in October of 2000 - the first week I started the site. WiFi was around, though nascent, as was Bluetooth. The idea of a powerful operating system on a camera captured my imagination six years ago:
“Imagine a digital camera running Windows CE. Imagine snapping pictures and having them automatically emailed to you via a Bluetooth chip on the camera that talks to your cell phone on your hip. Storage becomes a thing of the past - the CF card in the camera is more of a buffer for your cell phone than anything else. Or imagine having a built-in FTP program that would automatically push your images up to a web site as you’re shooting them - real-time photography and events coverage could usher in a new era of photo journalism. Raw, unedited, up to the second coverage. Imagine having Pocket Artist on your camera - you could crop, edit, and tweak your images before uploading/emailing them. The possibilities are so endless here - if anyone has any upper-management contacts with Kodak, Olympus, Nikon, or any other major digital camera OEM, tell them I want to speak to them.”
Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see anything approaching this. This past year we’ve seen the first digital cameras with built-in WiFi, but the functionality is quite basic and usually requires desktop software to achieve any significant functionality. Given the small size and cost of WiFi chips, it would be great to see it in more cameras - and Windows Mobile running on a camera with a touchscreen and EVDO would be supremely cool. 