Smartphones

Because of an increasingly mobile workforce and amped-up innovation at device makers, the smartphone is finally living up to its promise and making inroads with the small and midsized enterprise market. As with any technology, the decision about whether smartphones are right for a specific company depends on a number of factors, including what types of applications are used, how salespeople and others in the field do their work, and how much is in the budget for such devices. One thing is certain, though: If smartphones are needed, there are plenty of options to fill any online shopping cart.

Camera Phones Picture Quality Improving

Camera phones will soon offer the type of picture quality now provided by today's entry-level digital cameras, a development that could make camera phones the primary snapshot-taker for many casual photographers.
Industry observers say they doubt a cell phone's camera will ever replace a stand-alone camera for the serious amateur photographer, much less for professionals.
But the growing capabilities of camera phones within two to three years will far surpass the grainy, poorly colored and out-of-focus images that characterize the typical cell phone picture today, making camera phones much more popular.
"What we will see is that the camera phone is going to be the Instamatic, the Brownie of cameras," said wireless analyst Ken Hyers of ABI Research, referring to popular point-and-shoot film cameras of the past.
Consulting firm Gartner recently estimated that nearly 300 million camera phones were sold last year, or about 38 percent of all phones sold worldwide. Gartner analyst Hugues de la Vergne said that in 2006, more than 60 percent of all phones sold in North America probably will have cameras. And they'll have better image quality than in the past.
To this point, most cameras in phones have been VGA quality, meaning resolutions of about 300,000 pixels, or 0.3 megapixels. However, de la Vergne said that the product lineups are changing.

ScanR Turns Cell Phone Pics Into Usable Documents

Start-up firm ScanR today announced a new service to process photos taken by camera phones and convert the image into a searchable document for future reference.
Photos taken with a camera phone are processed by an automated system, cleaned up to remove background noise, blurriness and other flaws, converted to the Portable Document Format (PDF) with embedded tags for keyword searching and e-mailed back to the person who sent them. Searching can be done with any desktop search software, like Google Desktop or the search feature in the forthcoming Microsoft Vista operating system.
For now and the coming months, the ScanR service is free, according to Chris Dury, vice president of marketing at ScanR, in Palo Alto, Calif. Eventually the company plans to announce a premium pricing schedule for high volume users, but the system will always be free for the casual user who only takes a few pictures per month.
"Our goal is to unlock information stuck in paper formats and use them in digital files," he said. "The scan/copy/fax market is a $35 billion global market, and the reality is you're overwhelmed with paper, and paper is hard to deal with. It's a lot easier to store your information when it's digital."
ScanR is not limited to camera phones. The company said about a third of its testers opted for digital cameras for their higher resolution though they require the extra step of transferring the images to a PC for emailing.
Neil Strother, research director for mobile devices at NPD Group, in Kirkland, Wash., said he was impressed with the engineering behind the product for cleaning up the scan, but wonders if it will reach a wide audience if there isn't a greater perceived need. "The key will be to find early adopters most inclined to use it," he said.