In the early 2000's, I remember in art school I did a project that involved driving around the country, leaving tiny sculptures wherever I went. To keep people updated where I was, I made a Perl script that accepted messages and photos sent to it that I authored on my fancy Sony Ericson picture phone. The script would update a website showing the photos and messages in reverse chronological order. Took maybe about 3…
Nowadays I'd know how to do this with an Arduino with a GSM module, how did you receive the pictures back then?
Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]
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Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]
#12In the early 2000's, I remember in art school I did a project that involved driving around the country, leaving tiny sculptures wherever I went. To keep people updated where I was, I made a Perl script that accepted messages and photos sent to it that I authored on my fancy Sony Ericson picture phone. The script would update a website showing the photos and messages in reverse chronological order. Took maybe about 3…
Nowadays I'd know how to do this with an Arduino with a GSM module, how did you receive the pictures back then?
Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]
#13My first encounter with a camera on a phone was when I was a kid in Japan in 2004. These girls had taken a video of me being bad at bowling (Amusingly the alley was called "Exciting Boring") and showed me on the bus, I was just completely aghast at the fact that this technology existed. It felt really invasive at the time, to be honest, but out in another culture you just have to roll with things like that.
> Exciting Boring Ha, thanks for sharing, that is amusing! On the one hand it seems like it almost could be the way people humorously transcribe Japanese accented English, of “Exciting Bowling,” and on the other hand in a purely English context that really does strike me as a quite good description of bowling when you think about it.
ボウリング - bōringu, this is the word they have for it, so yeah
Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]
#14In the early 2000's, I remember in art school I did a project that involved driving around the country, leaving tiny sculptures wherever I went. To keep people updated where I was, I made a Perl script that accepted messages and photos sent to it that I authored on my fancy Sony Ericson picture phone. The script would update a website showing the photos and messages in reverse chronological order. Took maybe about 3…
Nowadays I'd know how to do this with an Arduino with a GSM module, how did you receive the pictures back then?
The phone could even tether its GPRS connection via infrared! That always amazed me!
Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]
#15I remember seeing a land-line phone with video capability on a prime time talk show sometime in the 2000s as it was presented as a thing from the future. I'm glad that never really took off :D
They put a different meter on it and it was prohibitively expensive. ATT was early on a lot of technology such as working with MagicCap and Go. They had their own Hobbit processor. It was pretty cool tech until you saw the pricetag. Then you laughed, and laughed, tears rolled down your face ... $2,000 devices in 1995 money with $200/month usage bills being common (modern money is about double so think $4,000 tablet)…
The movie is really an alternate universe where tech like this is ubiquitous. There’s something about the late 90s / early 00s vision for tech future I have an increasingly difficult time grasping today.
Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]
#16Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]
#17I 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-...
Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]
#18MMS' 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…
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 we already had free data plans earlier and people used web pages and sent email etc. For USA that mostly came with the iphone. Applications, a software company doing it, with the app store and ecosystem with developers free to do what they wanted was a much better model.
Re: Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]
#19MMS' 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…
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…
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 access wikipedia to fact check people as a party trick in 06, but 3g still didn't feel on par with the 2g data services that Docomo and AU had been offering in Japan years before.