We're fast approaching the 25th anniversary of the camera phone, at least in the West. Sure, the first commercially available camera phone - the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210 - launched in 1999, but that was a Japan-only product. It wasn't until late 2001 that Nokia announced its first camera phone - the 7650 - and Europe got its first look at a digital camera packed into a mobile phone.
This was seriously cutting-edge kit. Standalone digital cameras were still in their infancy in 2001, with it being a couple more years until sales of digital cameras would overtake film. So to have a digital camera built into a svelte slider phone must have seemed almost worthy of something Q might give to James Bond.
The quality of the 7650's camera was never going to compete with a half-decent digital point-and-shoot of the era, as it had to make do with a VGA (0.3MP, 640 x 480 pixels) sensor, but it was the novel ability to have a camera with you wherever you went that set the 7650 apart.
And the cost to be at the bleeding edge of mobile imaging? 600 Euros, or around 1000 Euros in today's money. That might sound pretty reasonable in comparison to the cost of a flagship phone today, but for perspective, the legendary Nokia 3310 would have cost roughly one quarter of the price at the time.
This 2001 BBC news report covered the phone's announcement, but it wasn't only the camera hardware that made the 7650 special. Nokia didn't just want you to snap photos with the phone; it also wanted you to share them. Of course, this was years before social media and internet-based instant messaging services, so the only way you’d be able to wirelessly send photos (beyond line-of-sight infrared transfer) was using the (then) new MMS service.
The Multimedia Messaging Service was devised as an upgrade to existing SMS tech and meant that it wouldn’t just be text messages that could be sent between phones; you’d also be able to send photos. However, while the future was bright back then, the sun hadn't quite risen above the horizon for the mass sharing of camera phone images.
I was 16 in 2001, and therefore exactly in the demographic that had made SMS so popular. Back then in the UK a single 140-character text message cost 10 pence to send, and we would try our hardest to ruin the English language in order to send as much information as possible within that 140-character limit. Conversations that read like 'U gota d8 w/ ur gf l8r?' became standard between teens in the early 2000s, such was the financial constraints placed upon us by the strictly limited phone credit at our disposal (go just 1 character over that 140 limit and you're paying twice as much - the jeopardy was real!). Now consider that a single MMS would cost around three times the price of one SMS, while also requiring you and your recipient to both have compatible high-end handsets, and you can appreciate why the industry experts featured in that 2001 BBC report didn't expect the camera phone and instant picture messaging to take off straight away. In my personal experience, it wasn't really until 3G-capable phones and internet-based messaging took off in the late 2000s that mobile image sharing became commonplace, as there was no longer a specific cost associated with sending a photo between phones.
So next time you’re casually sharing a snap in Instagram or WhatsApp, remember that at the start of the millennium most would have thought that was science fiction.
