I’m no phone-technology expert, but I do try to keep up with what’s
going on in that world — especially when it comes to still-photo and
video capability of cell phones, since that’s important to the media
world. So over the weekend I was at a neighborhood party and chatted
with a couple engineers who are working on next-generation cell phones.
What’s coming will be great news for the citizen-journalism movement —
and traditional reporting, too.
Right now most phones on the market in the U.S. (including my Motorola
V551) have poor-quality cameras; the situation is a bit better in some
other regions, especially parts of Asia. (Here’s an example
taken when the only camera available on a bike trip last summer was my
phone.) The next-gen phone these guys were working on will be the
equivalent of today’s high-end digital cameras — featuring an
8-megapixel camera capable of doing excellent-quality video.
Another cool feature that’s coming: Storage will be on tiny SD cards,
allowing a more convenient way to get images off the phone than what’s
common today (using the phone network to e-mail an image to an Internet
account). Just pull the card out of the phone and pop it in a reader.
While such phones likely won’t hit the U.S. markets till 2007, it
should appear in places like Japan, Singapore, and South Korea in 2006.
This is exciting stuff when it comes to journalism. Consider “citJ”:
When such phones become commonplace, there will be an army of citizen
reporters carrying around phone cameras (and most of us carry our
phones around like a set of keys these days) capable of recording
breaking news at high quality. And for every reporter to have a
high-quality camera built into a device they carry around routinely
anyway could be useful in situations where the professional photojournalists aren’t
around.
