The Hindu : Sharing pictures? It's a snap

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Sep 14, 2003

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National

Sharing pictures? It's a snap

By Anand Parthasarathy

The Japanese-Swedish combo Sony Ericsson launched its first camera-phone T 610, in the Indian market a few weeks ago and is aggressively promoting it through a barrage of print and TV advertisements. The company loaned one of its first pieces to The Hindu for an independent `test drive'. Here is our report:

The T 610 which is priced just below Rs. 20,000, is a successor to the T 68i, one of the first camera phones to be Blue Tooth enabled — that is, one can download text and pictures wirelessly to a nearby PC or laptop that is similarly enabled. To support its camera functions, the model comes with a built-in software called QuickShare that simplifies the process of sharing photos between phones or with a PC (keeping in mind the network limitations described in the main news item). The screen is a great improvement on the T 68i and is equivalent to over 65,000 colours. In addition to Blue Tooth, the T610 has infrared connectivity — similar to the TV remote — for those PCs with that feature. The basic phone is WAP and GPRS enabled which will allow it to access the Internet by either technology as long as the service provider makes it happen.

Taking pictures is — literally — a snap. One click activates the camera, the second captures it; the third discards it if you don't like what you captured or readies it for sending to the MMS or email recipient. The phone has a 2 MB memory, so that you can store pictures for later viewing or editing. The makers provide a CD that puts some useful picture editing tools on your PC.

After a lot of digging on the Web I learnt that the pictures taken by the T610 have a resolution of 288 by 352 — i.e. around one lakh pixels. This is quite OK for posting pictures on the Web since they display at a maximum of 72 dots per inch. But my guess is this resolution is insufficient to produce a printable image larger than passport size. But a camera-phone is not inherently a substitute for a digital camera — where the minimum resolution these days is about 1.3 mega pixels (that is 1.3 million pixels). Rather, it is a handy gadget that is great for sending illustrated messages. You can send your doctor a close-up of a wound for example and get his opinion by return MMS.

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