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Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

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Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#21

Post by vesinisa »

undebuggable wrote: post #20

He is right, media over MMS never took off. Mobile internet with messaging apps were the next big thing. Phones of that era were not capable of user friendly apps.

Operators charged per MMS sent. And MMSes were much more expensive than SMSes. I was a student back then and won an early premium Nokia phone with camera in a competition. It was cool for taking pictures for my own use. But I literally knew no one who had a phone that could receive MMSes, and even if I had known, I definitely saw it only as a trap to getting ripped off by the mobile operator.

The camera quality was of course terrible compared to modern standards, but under good lighting conditions it was still acceptable. But I ended up selling the phone (for beer money) on eBay in short order while it was still "like new".

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#22

Post by rvense »

cosmodisk wrote: post #17
OnionBlender wrote: post #10

I remember Mike Lazaridis (BlackBerry CEO) saying: > There will never be a BlackBerry with an MP3 player or camera. https://bgr.com/general/rims-inside-story-an-exclusive-look-...

I recently started trying not to be overly dismissive about all the new stuff that is trending or picking up traction. I like tech, I make living off it, yet I'm one of those that happily move to 70's and use paper and pen instead. Now,instead of trying to shoot it down immediately, I at least try to understand what's going on and how different groups could benefit of it. So far it seems to be a positive thing.

I also have very strong (negative) feelings about new technology. I used to think this was the result of Very Deep And Rational Thoughts, but a while ago I realized that it was maybe a little conspicuous that I'd decided that computers happened to reach their peak when I was about 21. Like some boomer Bob Dylan fan.

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#23

Post by jrimbault »

wodenokoto wrote: post #19
Gravityloss wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was because operators wanted the cash flow. SMS was a goldmine. So naturally they tried to get in on the MMS. The operators were also really bad in producing any kind of services that customers wanted. The WAP era was full of applications that nobody used, like "get a poem for a lady". I think they cost per use. Really short sighted. But operators didn't have the kind of thinking or resources required. In Europe…

_free_ dataplans in 2006? Is in "all you can use" data at a fixed price? I haven't seen that anywhere ever. Europe, Asia, middle east. Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me. I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour. I could acces…

Not 2006, but in 2007 (in France, I was 15) you could get unlimited calls, sms and mms (and a generous data cap I can't remember the details of, but it was in the gigabytes), for a fixed monthly price. That wasn't the subscription I had, it was some tier above mine.

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#24

Post by justinator »

vachina wrote: post #11
somedude895 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays I'd know how to do this with an Arduino with a GSM module, how did you receive the pictures back then?

Probably email attachment

Bingo. The phone could send a mixed text and image message as a multipart MIME message. I made an email forward that piped to a Perl script. That Perl script read the text and image data using something like MIME::Parser, and saved that stuff in a database. Another script read that data and returned some HTML using Template Toolkit and CGI.pm. Really just something I threw together the night before I left.

I remember a few years later someone was showing me how you could text a message to a specific number, then it showed up on this "Twitter" site and that seemed quaint.

Anyways Perl was so easy and fun some Painting and Drawing undergrad could throw something together that was that useful to his 5 friends and his completely confused professor (and pay for art school hacking on other stuff too).

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#25

Post by justinator »

Raed667 wrote: post #14
somedude895 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays I'd know how to do this with an Arduino with a GSM module, how did you receive the pictures back then?

Around ~2005 I had a Sony Ericsson K300, and my main method was to send pictures to the computer via infrared (yes I had to buy an infrared USB dongle) and then posting them on skyblog.com The phone could even tether its GPRS connection via infrared! That always amazed me!

Yup looks similar to the one I had. I bought it at Car Toys because there weren't even T-Mobile stores yet. It took like 2 hours to transfer my number from another carrier (a new ability at the time!) and activate the account - what a process!

I remember the keypad was kinda small for my giant hands, but it would connect via this thing called "Bluetooth" to my Mac. Every time you got a text, it would show up on my Mac's screen, and I could reply just using my keyboard instead of typing out something using T9 on the phone itself. Soooo much faster. Somehow the ability to do that was disabled or something, I dunno.

I hadn't felt that sort of magical integration again until I realized you can copy and paste between a Mac and an iPhone you had on the same Apple ID (or however it works, I totally forget the details) so long as Bluetooth is enabled on both. Such magic and solved so many tiny little problems. I missed years of Airdropping as my last Macbook just couldn't work with Airdrop and I have no idea why not. Seeing Airdrop work instantly sold me on iPhones and I'll never go back to Android.

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#26

Post by kanisae »

wodenokoto wrote: post #7

MMS' where ridiculously expensive when they came out. 2-3 times a regular text message wouldn't do it. On top of that, MMS was janky AF (probably still is. I don't know anyone who uses them on purpose). Unclear if receiver could receive your message. If they couldn't, you still had to pay. Sometimes they'd receive a link instead of a picture, sometimes just junk. Pictures where already pretty lousy straight off the p…

I owned MMS platform for a carrier back in the day. Everything about it was janky. "Hey let's emulate SMTP commands but over HTTP and then try to track all the different models of phones to transcribe images so they can kinda sorta interopate"

Thenb you got to watch the huge queue build up every Christmas morning and New Years as the inter carrier brokers got backed up hours. All in all, not my favorite carrier app to manage.

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#27

Post by d--b »

I went to Japan in 2004. I hiked a mountain and at the top saw a woman talk to someone on her flip phone. At some point she said something like “hey do you want to see the view?”, she then turned the phone around and I realized she had been video chatting the whole time. I was so amazed. I bought a Wap-capable NEC that year, it felt so ahead of anything we had in Europe!

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#29

Post by wwtrv »

wodenokoto wrote: post #19
Gravityloss wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was because operators wanted the cash flow. SMS was a goldmine. So naturally they tried to get in on the MMS. The operators were also really bad in producing any kind of services that customers wanted. The WAP era was full of applications that nobody used, like "get a poem for a lady". I think they cost per use. Really short sighted. But operators didn't have the kind of thinking or resources required. In Europe…

_free_ dataplans in 2006? Is in "all you can use" data at a fixed price? I haven't seen that anywhere ever. Europe, Asia, middle east. Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me. I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour. I could acces…

I recall (in a European country) a brief time window around then when you indeed could a get an unlimited plan rather cheaply. There were no restriction on tethering either so you could get unlimited data on your laptop. Considering how low GPRS/EDGE bandwidth was (and that only a very limited number of people probably did this) the operators probably didn't mind, they added caps pretty soon after '3G' came out.

Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

#30

Post by TaylorAlexander »

d--b wrote: post #27

I went to Japan in 2004. I hiked a mountain and at the top saw a woman talk to someone on her flip phone. At some point she said something like “hey do you want to see the view?”, she then turned the phone around and I realized she had been video chatting the whole time. I was so amazed. I bought a Wap-capable NEC that year, it felt so ahead of anything we had in Europe!

It was a weird time, being in the USA and learning that Europe and Japan had all these great technologies in their mobile phones that we didn’t have. It sucked being so behind the times here. It’s interesting that now every country has the same high tech mobile phones, though there are still niche devices that may only be produced for a specific region.
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