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Capturing changing phone use
Adding a camera has transformed the mobile phone into the ultimate personal communication device, changing media, society and relationships in the process.
October 2, 2006
Looking at pictures makes people happy. In fact, one recent study found that groups looking through personal photographs had a higher and more consistent lift in mood compared to groups that tried to eat, listen, watch or drink their way to happiness.
Erik Kruse, senior expert of consumer behavior at Ericsson Consumer & Enterprise Lab says that, for the most part, camera phones are still being used in rather old-fashioned ways - for taking pictures and storing them on the phone as virtual photo albums.
Kruse says many operators have shown disappointment in Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), the service that enables pictures to be sent over the mobile. "The expectations on MMS have been too high from the start," Kruse says. "In the light of SMS, many people thought MMS would take off much faster than it actually has.
"All new communication services take time to become popular, because it takes time to build up critical mass. Many people forget that it took more than 10 years for SMS to reach critical mass."
People are accustomed to using their phones for many purposes - as a camera and precious reserve of memories, as a device to fend off unwanted attention, as a watchdog on society to fight crime, for playing games and surfing the net, as a mailbox, a radio, calendar, alarm clock, even a publishing device.
Kruse says: "Operators shouldn't give up: the MMS market starts now. The quality and handling of the service is much better than when it was launched in 2002. Operators that have actively been marketing MMS are seeing increased usage."
One reason some users have not sent images from their phones is that they have been ill informed of the cost and perceive it as an expensive service. Other users have been disappointed when they were unable to send pictures while on vacation, the reason being that not all operators have agreements with each other.
Operators can be creative in how they encourage and inspire users to adopt new behaviors - being clearer on price, informing users of limitations, bundling, packaging and promoting.
Newspapers and television channels are already paying for people's pictures and footage of big happenings, and are launching camera phone picture contests.
Kruse says: "Blogging will be the next trend - uploading personal pictures or texts to personal homepages, or to communities."
Camera phone picture quality will continue to improve, upstream transmission bandwidth will increase, and wireless connectivity for images will become a more natural part of every day life.
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In the four years since camera phones have been introduced, they have become the most predominant image-capturing devices in the world. According to a new forecast by Lyra Research, the installed base of camera phones will reach about 850 million units in 2006, and this number is expected to grow to more than 1.5 billion units in 2010. |
