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As photojournalists say, "the best camera is the one you have with you". Mobile phones, as devices which are always carried, are thus prime candidates to have cameras. It's thus no surprise that camera phones have become quite popular recently.

However, people who own mobile phones, even camera phones, continue to purchase separate digital cameras. Why? They have more storage, they are optimized for taking pictures, and they take better pictures. These advantages are likely to stay - especially the design optimization. But are they really doing everything they ought to?

Consider, if you will, a camera with communications capabilities. It could have SMS or some other push technology, J2ME, and ideally location (perhaps GPS) built in. Connectivity could be any wireless connectivity, preferably something with good coverage. A Bluetooth connection to a mythical modem-phone would be ideal.

The location technology would be used to add metadata to pictures - in addition to time and date, place would be stored. When a server is available, the latitude and longitude would be converted to city, country, state, and ideally neighborhood or other more relevant data (dinner at "TGI Fridays in Duluth" would be very useful for finding the picture again).

J2ME would allow the user to download relevant applications that the camera manufacturer might not want to make. A Flickr application could post pictures directly to the user's online account, live. A blogging application could take a picture, attach a voice recording from the built-in microphone, and post the result to a moblog or podcast site.

Higher end cameras (either professional or the slightly lower featured prosumer) might have available a "breaking news" type application in which a picture is submitted to the media source(s) of the user's choice immediately.

A particularly interesting J2ME application could add metadata based on face recognition. One face could be defined as being "Bob"; whenever that face was recognized in any picture, Bob gets added to one of the content metadata fields.

SMS could allow sending a relevant URL to an automatically-posted picture to a set of people. It could also push updates.

Each of these services could provide a nice revenue to some set of companies. Carriers might want to add a camera service for the masses, or a camera MVNO could be established.

Inspired by C. Enrique Ortiz' excellent recommendations on responsible location-based services application design, we offer our own recommendations:

• Alert the user (replicates an Ortiz recommendation) that data is being collected - manage the privacy notice well
• Give the user control (expands an Ortiz recommendation) about whether to collect data
  • For safety applications, turning location tracking off should be difficult, with lots of confirmations
  • For convenience applications, turning location tracking off should be easy
• Ensure that there is a visual flag for ongoing data collection, especially for background applications (especially important if your application obscures the device's status icons, but relevant regardless)
• Protect the data (replicates an Ortiz recommendation)
  • Data on device should not be discoverable by other applications (a determined hacker can take apart the data on the device, so go ahead and encrypt it)
  • Data transmitted should be encrypted
  • Data stored on server should be protected

Ortiz also recommends against geo-fencing, the practice of automatically tracking and alerting (a server, usually) when a person enters or leaves a specific geographic region. He instead recommends passive monitoring, in which the device decides when to report to the server. His recommendation is generally good, but for certain applications not valid. For example, a parent might indicate a specific area where her teen is allowed to be without any further permissions (for example, the mall, school, and surrounding area); geofencing is the correct solution. A less contraversial situation is asset tracking, particularly for service or delivery trucks. Active monitoring could be important to track the company's assets. We have other recommendations based on the exact type of application you are developing. Examples include:

• A voyage-based travel application should only monitor location during the trip itself - a few hours before the flight is scheduled to depart until the user has found his car upon return.
• Coupon or discount or advertising applications should send location data only to the specific parties authorized to know the user's location. A specific restaurant for a lunchtime coupon application would not have permission, so don't give a specific user's identifying data to them. Restaurants could have access to aggregate data (number of users within the standard radius; number of users within the walking-by radius) - but you'd want to require that they actually deliver value to the users. Thus restaurants would have to send out a minimum number of coupons per week or month.

Other applications have other issues, and it is worthwhile consulting with an expert to ensure you are doing the right thing.

There was a rumor going around at CTIA that Amazon.com was going to start an MVNO, that Jeff Bezos was already interviewing handset designers.

I would love to see an Amazon.com MVNO that was fully developed, even if it was an example of gross consumerism. Amazon.com has an incredible array of content already in-house, even if it is not currently understood as consumer content. For example, most albums available have one to three songs downloadable as a preview, and the "search inside" function gives access to many books.

Amazon's personalization platform, which saves purchases the user has made and also makes product suggestions based on history, could be readily extended to movie and restaurant recommendations, or even clubs and drinks. Adding reviews - especially audio reviews - for anything, and you have the basis for a new type of community.

When you add a camera to the mix things get very interesting. Some server-based character recognition and you can immediately search for a book title, contents within a book, a music label, or any product that contains the text. Add a "search the web" link and you have another point of integration between the web and the physical world.

Partner with one of the image recognition companies and you can search not only for movie posters for current movies, but for any related products on sale. Do an image match between a product in the environment and product images in the Amazon database, and you have a seamless shopping experience. Or simply add the item to your wish list.

You'd want to avoid requiring any of this to be on the standby screen, but even what the users choose to put there could be useful information. This MVNO could be an excellent opportunity for both Amazon and for consumers.

AOL has a new mobile search service which gives phone users the ability to search the entire Internet. They claim that what makes them special is that they automatically convert the sites for display on the phone. As always, I'm skeptical about such claims.

In this case, my concerns are valid.

I tried searching for my own company. As you can see, the first 22 lines are advertising. That's over two full screens on almost any device. Not good.

The search results themselves are provided by Google, which is a good decision.

Worse is the content rewriting engine, provided by InfoGin. It lost the top level navigation on the page completely, and put contextual information at the bottom rather than the top of the page. I understand the need to skip navigation, but deleting it is unacceptable.

My site is very simple, with nothing more than XHTML. I would go test more complex sites, but the service is down for the fifth time in two hours.

Text entry is a major usability concern for mobile devices, and lots of companies are seeking the best solution. One of the better solutions in the use category of needing a hand and a surface is FrogPad. (see our overview of mobile text input use categories and example solutions)

While I've been aware of FrogPad for a couple years now, I couldn't convince myself to spend the money for an extra keyboard for my computer. However, I now have a Bluetooth PDA, and FrogPad's Bluetooth keyboard is only $149. When I added the fact that I have a new baby and am frequently typing one-handed anyhow, I decided to spend the money.

First, there are many aspects of the entire operation that feel "cheap". The main page of the website has a float-in window that only somewhat works on my browser, when clicking the "add to cart" button in the web store the page merely refreshes and does not give any feedback that the operation was successful, the return policy is odd, and the email receipt does not indicate what was purchased (but the web-presented invoice does).

All of this makes FrogPad's cutesy communication style (calling the product "Froggy", describing the left- and right-handed designs as "lefty" and "righty", and folksy "we have vowels, too" in the user guide) seem less than professional. One thing I've learned from the experience is that if you want to be cutesy or folksy, you have to have a rock solid product and experience to support it.

The product came quickly, and I was excited to open it. The keyboard itself feels only a little bit cheap (not bad in today's environment) but I really don't like the rattle when I tilt it back and forth. It makes me think that the keyboard will break. I also don't like the fact that I can't really tell whether I've successfully slid the on switch to on (which isn't labeled) and the pairing button (much like a Palm reset button) only appears to have a contact for half of the hole. I'm definitely keeping the 1-year warranty information as I expect to have to use it.

The design of the product is pretty good for standard text entry. If you are a person who uses your mouse to start applications, switch between applications, and perform actions like save, you'll be up and running very quickly. I, on the other hand, use lots of keyboard shortcuts and operate most of my launching activities (including Google and visiting bookmarks) from LaunchBar so this is less useful. After all, a key combination that on a standard keyboard is 3 keys, on the FrogPad could take 5 - in 3 separate operations.

However, for intensive standard writing, it appears to be quite good. In my 30 minutes of working with it, I quickly move from hunt-and-peck to touch-typing over three quarters of my keystrokes. This is due to the intelligent arrangement of letters. This little 15-key keyboard has all the functions of a standard 101-key keyboard. The most frequent 15 letters in the alphabet are accessible with a single keypress, and the remaining letters and the most common punctuation accessible by pressing the "green key" (space button) in combination with a standard key. Other symbols are accessible by pressing a symbol key, then a single key or a green key combination.

There are four modifier keys: green (space), orange (number), symbol, and shift. Two require simultaneous keypress, one toggles state, and the last toggles state for a single keypress. This combination is pretty confusing for a new user ... I would have considered adding one extra button and making the state-control buttons more consistent. It would make the device far more accessible to the novice.

I felt more wrist strain than I am accustomed to on a standard keyboard (but much less than trying to type on a handheld device such as a phone or PDA).

My summary so far: I'll use the device for computer data entry when I have only one hand available, but not when I have two. However, when I want to do intense data entry on my Palm, I'll use the keyboard. This may allow me to reduce use of my computer for meetings, which would be quite useful. I'll post another review as I become more expert.

Oh - and I really appreciate the integrated cover that protects the keys when not in use. That will make the product more reliable as it gets tossed into less-than-sterile satchels for transit.

As I've written in the past, one of the wonderful aspects of mobile devices is the availability of alternate input devices such as voice and camera. A recent News.com article on camera phone search technology describes several companies using the camera as web input.

Mobot does exclusively marketing, but they also have a more general image recognition technology. They target things like allowing users to take pictures of movie posters to get movie info or tickets, brand logos, CD covers, or any sort of printed advertisement to get information or purchase related merchandise (such as ringtones). I expect that the biggest issue with their vision of taking a picture of something like a movie poster rather than a special bar code is that not every movie poster would be in the database, leading to needing to put an extra message on the movie poster - or user frustration and eventual product abandonment.

Neven Vision appears to have a technology that is similar to, but slightly more generalized than, PaperClick (who specializes in bar codes). Neven Vision's marketing tool, iScout, uses visual hyperlinks to indicate "clickable" (pict-able?) items. They also have a more generalized product allowing users to take a picture of any product or picture of a product (such as TV or a print ad) that would allow the user to go to an internet site that has the product for sale. Again, until the majority of products are in the database this is likely to result in user frustration and abandonment of the product.

If the above technologies are possible, then it certainly should be possible for some travel and location based technologies to use the camera as an input. Imagine a visitor's bureau uploading pictures of their entire tourist region. A tourist could then take a picture of anything in the area, get directions, or further information on any location. This would be more accurate than most current GPS systems, with the additional benefit that it could work indoors (like in shopping malls).