Cellular operator(s) to remove ability to save photos to handset's memory card?

Shane Conder, a BREW developer at wireless software company Rocket Mobile, posts on his Weblog that cellular operators are going to require that camera phone users transmit photos only wirelessly via MMS rather than also being able to save photos on memory cards. Here's what Shane wrote:

"Carriers will be hindering quick snappers by not allowing images to be saved to external cards (so what are they for?!) by requiring all images that move off a phone to go through MMS. I know this from stuff I can't post specifics about. I also hope market forces make it change before it's a reality. Unfortunately, I know that my current project has to implement it (the restriction). :(

"This, alone, certainly limits the range of uses on some camera phones. Another megapixel camera phone doesn't even have a memory slot. Of course, at high jpeg compression it could store 200 1.3 megapixel images!"

Seriously stupid

If cellular operators are going to prevent users from saving photos to memory cards in the phone, this is a seriously stupid thing to do. The harm to consumers is so obvious that I'm not even going to discuss it!

But it also could harm the cellular operators. Although I'm not a fan of the intelligence of the human race (I definitely am not a "man of the people" -- nor do I want to be), users will quickly learn that they can't save photos to a memory card -- when other cellular operators don't disable this feature.

Also, I wonder whether disabling the ability to save photos to a memory card also will carry over to saving any type of file -- music, video, text, etc. In addition, if the cellular operator(s) is/are so user-hostile as to prohibit transferring data to a memory card, I wouldn't be surprised if it would be impossible to transfer data via a cable, infrared or Bluetooth.

Head it off at the pass

If a cellular operator is indeed disabling the memory card function -- and I have no first hand knowledge of it -- perhaps adverse publicity could make the cellular operator think twice. Of course, using a word "think" in conjunction with a cellular operator that would consider disabling memory card functionality does a disservice to the word "think." Thinking has nothing to do with this decision (again, if it's true).

If you want to play a guessing game...since Rocket Mobile develops only for BREW, you could look at cellular operators that offer BREW and wonder which one (or ones) is/are going to do this.

I can't imagine that cellular subscribers would stand for this.

Comments

[Derek Kerton]

What I've always wondered is why carriers let the SD slots get added to the phones they sell. I can clearly see the benefit as a consumer, but memory slots, Bluetooth, sync cables, etc. are all ways of putting data on and off a handset without traveling over the cellular network. Carriers show varying resistance to all the above (see any Bluetooth on US CDMA?), but they seem to have let the SD slots slip by. They've let the genie out of the bottle, and now (thankfully) it won't go back in.

[Shane Conder]

I personally hope it doesn't actually happen.

But I'll also say this:

Doesn't it follow that as image size increases and features such as video are added to handsets that that they will not only be able to store more on their own but they'll also be able to send more?

Perhaps good can come out of it: If everyone does send images and it swamps the network then the big "they" have to build out bigger, better, faster, and cheaper networks. ;)

So here's a question:

I snap a picture with my trusty 4megapixel pocket camera, pull the SD card out of it, and drop it into my trusty cell-phone-come-pocket-broadband link. Can I send this huge image? Can I do anything with it on the handset? Do any handsets in the world allow anything currently?

In other words, why bother using the internal camera if the phone has a card slot to use images from a real camera.

[Dean Bubley]

Can't see it happening, myself. People are already used to SD and Compact Flash cards in cameras. Also, 1 or 2 megapixel images won't really compress enough at decent quality for the usual maximum 100kb MMS size. <100kb would be OK for snapshots sent via email, but would look lousy if printed or shown as holiday pic on a PC or TV screen at full size.

One additional thought: What MIGHT happen is that the phone encrypts/encodes the image on the card so it can't be read as a normal JPG on a PC, but CAN be read by an operator's PC client software (for a fee) or by a Kodak/Fuji/etc partner's kiosk in a photo printing lab.

Dean Bubley
Disruptive Analysis

[Tom Karches]

If they institute this, how many days will it be until someone cracks the security and reenables this function? I'd give it a month max.