Cameraphones are different cameras & different phones

From David Pescovitz’s “The Big Picture“:

Mobile researcher John Poisson, CEO of the Fours Initiative, focuses on how cameraphones could revolutionize photography and communication — if people would only start using them more.

As the leader of Sony Corporation’s mobile media research and design groups in Tokyo, John Poisson spent two years focused on how people use cameraphones, and why they don’t use them more often.

TheFeature: What have you learned over the course of your research?

Poisson: People think of the cameraphone as a more convenient tool for digital photography, an extension of the digital camera. That’s missing the mark. The mobile phone is a communications device. The minute you attach a camera to that, and give people the ability to share the content that they’re creating in real time, the dynamic changes significantly.

TheFeature: Aren’t providers already developing applications to take advantage of that shift?

Poisson: Well, we have things like the ability to moblog, to publish pictures to a blog, which is not necessarily the most relevant model to consumers. Those tools are developed by people who understand blogging and apply it in their daily lives. But it ignores the trend that we and Mimi Ito and others are seeing as part of the evolution of photography. If you look at the way people have (historically) used cameras, it started off with portraiture and photographs of record — formalized photographs with a capital “P.” Then as the technology evolved, we had this notion of something called a snapshot, which is much more informal. People could take a higher number of pictures with not so much concern over composition. It was more about capturing an experience than photographing something. The limit of that path was the Polaroid. It was about taking the picture and sharing it instantly. What we have today is the ability to create today is a kind of distributed digital manifestation of that process.