Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]
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I didn't realize I had invented Instagram. Shoulda spent a little more time on it.
I remember a few years later someone was showing me how you could text a message to a specific number, then it showed up on this "Twitter" site and that seemed quaint.
Anyways Perl was so easy and fun some Painting and Drawing undergrad could throw something together that was that useful to his 5 friends and his completely confused professor (and pay for art school hacking on other stuff too).
The phone could even tether its GPRS connection via infrared! That always amazed me!
I remember the keypad was kinda small for my giant hands, but it would connect via this thing called "Bluetooth" to my Mac. Every time you got a text, it would show up on my Mac's screen, and I could reply just using my keyboard instead of typing out something using T9 on the phone itself. Soooo much faster. Somehow the ability to do that was disabled or something, I dunno.
I hadn't felt that sort of magical integration again until I realized you can copy and paste between a Mac and an iPhone you had on the same Apple ID (or however it works, I totally forget the details) so long as Bluetooth is enabled on both. Such magic and solved so many tiny little problems. I missed years of Airdropping as my last Macbook just couldn't work with Airdrop and I have no idea why not. Seeing Airdrop work instantly sold me on iPhones and I'll never go back to Android.
whoa
Although I didn't realize that compromised phone can steal data from my laptop :|
The trend across all social media is to feed us with more 'high-ranking' content from 'strangers' because it's typically what we want to see more of, based on the analytics. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook — all of them are pivoting to feed us more content from people outside of our personal networks as fast as possible.
All kidding aside, I personally had a revelation on how much of my attention has been getting stolen away from me, tiny bit by tiny bit. I'm going to make an honest attempt to gain some of that back. More reading out of physical books, less doomscrolling. More taking people out to coffee, less overdosing on puppy videos.
On top of that, MMS was janky AF (probably still is. I don't know anyone who uses them on purpose). Unclear if receiver could receive your message. If they couldn't, you still had to pay. Sometimes they'd receive a link instead of a picture, sometimes just junk. Pictures where already pretty lousy straight off the phone, but after a trip through MMS they where just terrible.
On top of that, pictures were excruciatingly difficult to get off your phone. I'm not saying the first few iPhones had great cameras, but they did make it relatively easy to move your pictures to your computer and from there to flickr. With the eventual app-store, wi-fi connection made it cost-effective and easy to upload to the web straight from your phone. And chat apps made it reasonable to send pictures from phone to phone.
The operators were also really bad in producing any kind of services that customers wanted. The WAP era was full of applications that nobody used, like "get a poem for a lady". I think they cost per use. Really short sighted. But operators didn't have the kind of thinking or resources required.
In Europe we already had free data plans earlier and people used web pages and sent email etc. For USA that mostly came with the iphone. Applications, a software company doing it, with the app store and ecosystem with developers free to do what they wanted was a much better model.
Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me.
I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour.
I could access wikipedia to fact check people as a party trick in 06, but 3g still didn't feel on par with the 2g data services that Docomo and AU had been offering in Japan years before.
Once the iPhone and other smartphones caught on those plans all disappeared. Now they're back again with LTE-A/5G.
It's impossible to put too much emphasis on this part. The envisioned MMS money deluge never happened (at least outside Japan? I have zero understanding of market history there), but it was the sole reason that suddenly all phones had cameras. In those days network operators were still the almost exclusive sales channel for phone hardware, so if they decided that phones without camera would not sell, that's what happened. Even if no consumer actually wanted that feature.
I really believe that in an alternative history where the SMS goldmine never happened (and thus no MMS goldmine illusions) it's possible (though not likely?) that we might still use dedicated hardware for image capture. And in that case, given the political implications of "every person always has a camera with them", world history would be meaningfully different, just because its past does not contain that future that never happened (MMS goldmine).
Thenb you got to watch the huge queue build up every Christmas morning and New Years as the inter carrier brokers got backed up hours. All in all, not my favorite carrier app to manage.
Another specific niche might be babushkaphones. It's a cell phone made for babushkas. Basically huge buttons, screen with huge fonts, dumbed down interface so people with very little technical knowledge could use them to be on line.
Banking. Not a niche device but there's no need for Venmo or PayPal type apps in much of the world. The government mandates all banking system Apis and there's instant free transfers to other accounts. I just had to pay a $10 transaction fee for a bank transfer in the USA and it was a hassle (not done phone to phone but through routing and bsb numbers).
Taxation. It's a government integrated system. It still has a ton of special tax edge cases but for the most part you log in see your employers entered wages and tax paid and acknowledge. It's a much much better app than TurboTax and for the exceptions they are just checkboxes for meeting the criteria and fields for amount spent in the category etc. No TurboTax premium required since it's the government's app.
Universal public transit apps. You tap on the ferry with your phone and tap out of the train station later in your trip. It's all integrated.
In fact riffing on taxation why isn't there more done online. Why do I need to go to the DMV short of an in person driving test?
I believe this or similar systems are still in use in some countries.
Now: <sigh>.
And what always amazed me was that she grew up with people (mainly farm workers) who had never been more than 5 miles from where they were born. I go further than that to visit the supermarket!
This isn't as remarkable as it sounds when I say this was in 1960, and the neighbour was 80 something, and his uncle had been born in 1798, and had lived well into his 90s. But is still seems such a large span to be able to reach back.
Ha, thanks for sharing, that is amusing!
On the one hand it seems like it almost could be the way people humorously transcribe Japanese accented English, of “Exciting Bowling,” and on the other hand in a purely English context that really does strike me as a quite good description of bowling when you think about it.
ボウリング - bōringu, this is the word they have for it, so yeah
I didn’t mean to disparage, the exciting half carried equal weight in my mind, just something about maybe the environment, the wooden floor, the shoes, the overall aesthetic, waiting your turn in a group, punctuated by the anticipatory excitement of watching your ball travel down the lane gave me this feeling of like the type of balance common in Eastern spiritual traditions or Schrödinger’s cat, where it is boring and exciting at the same time.
My father went to Japan a lot in the 80s and always remarked at how the L in our last name got pronounced as an R in Japan making the name sound totally different.
Exciting Bowling would easily get pronounced as Exciting Boring and then someone could have had a laugh and come up with the name.
> There will never be a BlackBerry with an MP3 player or camera.
https://bgr.com/general/rims-inside-story-an-exclusive-look-...
ATT was early on a lot of technology such as working with MagicCap and Go. They had their own Hobbit processor.
It was pretty cool tech until you saw the pricetag. Then you laughed, and laughed, tears rolled down your face ... $2,000 devices in 1995 money with $200/month usage bills being common (modern money is about double so think $4,000 tablet)
Even if you got a couple price insensitive buyers, the technology is only useful if there's a network effect and that's where it broke down.
You weren't emailing their phone, it was an inbox they'd see next time they dialup to logon to the internet. It wasn't some obvious gain and faxing documents was a more reliable way to get to someone because you're changing their environment with a fax
The movie is really an alternate universe where tech like this is ubiquitous. There’s something about the late 90s / early 00s vision for tech future I have an increasingly difficult time grasping today.
You want that era? Here's two things to flip through
https://archive.org/search.php?query=mondo+2000
https://archive.org/search.php?query=verbum%20magazine
I went deep into that for back research on my most recent article https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/
I'll revisit it soon for something else I'm sure. Maybe the Douglas Rushkoff Cyberia world where this tech scene was entangled with the most hedonistic strains of new-ageism and overly indulgent on psychotropics - where a burner rambling about their dreams who won't live to see Y2K is somehow in the same car with a 25 year old stanford grad who just made $10 million and maybe just maybe how these ways of meaning somehow re-emerged together 20 years later to build the modern far right.
That's not my theory here btw, that's what I've been hearing from the journalists that covered it in the 90s. Pulling those narratives together from an outsider perspective using primary source material ... that's my offer.
Not just the cameras but the ability to send the image. I remember sending an MMS and not really being guaranteed the receiver would get the image. Perhaps they didn't have MMS enabled, or have a device able to receive images, or they didn't have a large enough phone plan to send/receive MMS's.
Now days, sending an image is just part of the furniture.
A part of me would like to rewind and see what the world was like without social media.
Makes me wonder what new trends dinosaurs like us don't see coming. VR?
I can see something that's a mix of VR chat and some creation tools a'la Dreams would be a hit. User generated content for VR Chat is already popular and making it possible to make the game in the game is natural next step
The best selling VR headset is cheaper than either a smartphone or a gaming console, though, is it not? You don't really see anyone arguing that teenagers can't afford those. Also, this stuff is usually bought by parents anyway.
I personally think a larger market will probably emerge for AR than for VR due to friction factors, but from what I've read, teenagers are in fact using VR right now.
It was very expensive to maintain a phone without a camera. Definitely prohibitively expensive for teens to have a camera phone and use sharing / MMS.
The camera quality was of course terrible compared to modern standards, but under good lighting conditions it was still acceptable. But I ended up selling the phone (for beer money) on eBay in short order while it was still "like new".
https://www.theonion.com/long-lost-jules-verne-short-story-t...