File this under the “well, duh!” category too, but megapixel cellcams are increasingly encroaching on digital camera turf.
I and many others have been saying this was going to happen for a long time now. This trend is just too obvious to be missed, right? I mean I always have my 7610 with me, and many, if not most, of the digipics I take are “photos of opportunity” for which a dedicated camera not with me is worthless. With the rapid advances in cellcam tech and new announcements on a daily basis (example: Samsung’s new Korean handset which supports 3MPix with an optical zoom), no one could possibly miss the glow in the dark, bigger than life writing on the wall that dedicated digicams will be increasingly driven upstream by cellcams, could they?
Well, apparently some people still aren’t getting it:
“We don’t believe there is a direct impact on our digital camera business from the sale of a mobile phones with high resolution cameras,” said Ken Sugiyama, operations manager at Fuji Photo Film’s public relations division.
Fuji, please talk to Sony.
A “duh!” article? Maybe, but there are some interesting stats buried in “Gadget-hungry Asia to lead demand for smartphones” including:
According to Strategy Analytics, Asia Pacific will buy a third of all smartphones in 2004, outstripping North America’s 27 percent share of sales and Western Europe’s 28 percent. By 2008, Asia’s share of smartphone sales is expected to rise to 36 percent, far exceeding the 23 percent expected for North America and 24 percent in Western Europe.
and
So far, smartphones have been a niche market. A total of 11.2 million phones shipped worldwide in 2003, just 2.1 percent of total handphone sales. But the figure is seen growing to 109.9 million units by 2008, about 14 percent of the total, data from Strategy showed.
Repeat after me: PDAs are dead, long live the smartphone!
Sun released the J2ME Wireless Toolkit (WTK) 2.2 Beta last month. The WTK 2.2 Beta supports developing J2ME apps targeted at:
- CLDC 1.1 and MIDP 2.0
- JTWI 1.0
- WMA 2.0 and MMA 1.1
- Mobile 3D Graphics API
- FileConnection and PIM APIs (aka the PDA Optional Packages)
- Java APIs for Bluetooth (simulated BT environment)
- J2ME Web Services
Jonathan Knudsen wrote a nice overview of the new WTK features. Click here to access it.
Note: If you’d like to use a development tool supporting a “live” Bluetooth radio environment, check out Nokia’s Series 60 MIDP SDK 2.1 Beta for Symbian OS as mentioned in my JavaOne 2004 Bluetooth BOF report.
Catching up on URLs I’ve filed for “review when I get the chance” tonight. If you’re a working wireless developer, this one is worth the price of admission alone: Russ and company provide URLs for UAProfs for a variety of makes and models.
