A camera phone is a mobile phone which has a camera built-in. Typically the receiving device must have a web browser with messaging or must be capable of decoding and displaying MMS information, as opposed to an ordinary telephone for example. The picture and video are usually delivered after the message recipient requests they be sent in response to a notification of a picture or video message received at a server. This is designed to manage bandwidth and device resources and be "well behaved" to others.
The first wireless picture phone prototype known as intellect, developed in 1993 by inventor Daniel A. Henderson, was received by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 2007. This pioneering system and device was designed to receive pictures and video data sent from a message originator to a message center for transmission and display on a wireless device such as a cellular telephone. However the integration of the cellular phone, the digital camera and a wireless internet infrastructure would take a few more years.
There have been over the years many video phones and cameras that include communications technologies. None of them had focused on the integration to the wireless Internet, allowing to share media instantly with anyone anywhere. Such experiments include for example in 1995 a device that was known as the Apple Video phone/PDA. There were several digital cameras with cellular phone transmission capability shown by companies such as Kodak, Olympus in the early 90s. There was also a digital camera with cellular phone designed by Shosaku Kawashima of Canon in Japan in May 1997. |
