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According to several reports, UK-based Vodafone Group has signed a deal with Japanese electronics manufacturer Sharp that will see the mobile operator launch Sharp's second-generation camera phones in the UK by Christmas 2002. According to the Japanese news service Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Sharp has already closed a deal to supply 1 million camera phones to Vodafone, although Sharp has only confirmed that it is in talks with the company.
Moreover, these new phones, along with similar models made by Nokia and Sony Ericsson, will become available to Irish consumers this autumn, explained Joan Keating, Vodafone Ireland's head of communications.
Sharp, which is Japan's third-largest mobile handset maker, was one of the first companies to bring camera phones to market, and recently it began shipping second-generation products with much-improved picture quality.
Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson has announced its T68i camera phone and Nokia has announced its 7610 and 7650 camera phones, and these are to be released onto the Irish market in the autumn as well. However, the new Sharp camera phones are understood to provide better picture quality than the camera phones provided by other handset manufacturers. In fact, the Sharp camera phones are credited with increasing the market share of Vodafone subsidiary J-Phone in Japan. J-Phone has taken market share from the market leader, NTT DoCoMo, whose market share has slipped from 66 percent down to 60 percent.
Although consumers will most likely find the ability to send a picture over their mobile a curiosity at first, Europe's mobile operators are hoping the service will become far more addictive as it becomes incorporated with MMS (multimedia messaging services). Indeed, MMS and GPRS, which together let users send colourful and animated messages, are the areas on which operators are pinning hopes for a sustained drive in data service revenues.
"We expect to start providing an MMS service in Ireland in the autumn," said Keating. "The delay isn't due to the Vodafone network but to the fact that handsets aren't yet available."
Nonetheless, cost is one potential barrier to the uptake of MMS in Europe, with several operators talking about charging at least EUR1 per message sent, which means that MMS will be an expensive way to distribute digital photographs. The handsets are also expensive, and the Nokia 7650 camera phone could cost as much as EUR500.
In the medium term, however, camera phones are expected to replace digital cameras. According to a recent report by Strategy Analytics entitled "Strategic Perspectives on Cellular Camera Phones," 16 million camera phones will be sold worldwide in 2002, and the report predicts that this figure will grow to 147 million in 2007. By comparison, 22 million digital cameras will be sold worldwide in 2002, but their slower growth rate of 34 percent will result in only 95 million sales in 2007.
The report predicted that once the picture quality of camera phones reached a par with the picture quality of digital cameras, only professional photographers and enthusiasts will continue to use dedicated digital cameras.
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