Sendo's new S600 camera phone (see below) includes, alas, just a VGA camera, but also incorporates software enabling photos to be resized, rotated and cropped. The S600 features a few image effects -- black and white, sepia and negative -- and a sharpness conrol.
The ability to crop photos before they are sent certainly could be useful. But I haven't seen it demonstrated so I can't comment further. I am a strong believer, however, in offering significantly greater image editing capabilities in the handset.
The S600 also enables users to select among five photo sizes. I guess if you take a snapshot at the high (ha, ha) 640 x 480 resolution and reduce the size, it could look better. The handset also includes a 5x digital zoom, Xoom, but digital zooms often produce blurry photos.
Death to VGA
Although I certainly understand the value of VGA photos, I am going to continue to disparage VGA phones. It's a crummy quality and the sooner it's replaced by one megapixel camera phones (with correspondingly good lenses and internal image enhancement software) the better.
Unfortunately, that's not going to happen for several years in the United States, although one megapixel phones might become the standard in Japan and South Korea in, perhaps 12 months.
The S600 is slated to be available in the late spring.
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