For those who lived through first the digital photography revolution and then the rise of the phone camera to being the dominant means of photograpy today, it is hard to believe that there are grown adults today who have never known a time when camera phones weren’t “a thing.”
As is true of nearly all technology, it took a while for things to get going in the mobile phone world. In the late 1990’s they’d gained almost complete acceptance, and SMS was the greatest thing to have ever happened to 160 characters of text. Soon enough, colour screens came along and we all asked ourselves why anyone cared as initial efforts were almost as bad as the first Gameboy Color. You just didn’t need colour on a phone screen – they weren’t high enough resolution to display pictures, games were still “snake or nothing” and it used up more battery power, although your battery lasted 2-3 days back then without trouble.
Then came Sony Ericsson with a cute little phone called the T68i. This was peak post year 2000 phone design, the smaller the better and boasting a colour screen with a whopping 101 x 80 pixel resolution and a really cool joystick controller, this phone was something else. It had a trick up its neoprene sleeve too, a camera that you could click in to the base and use to take VGA (for the PC geeks out there) 640 x 480 pixel images or 0.3 megapixels if you like. This was the beginning of something very special, but we didn’t quite know what to do with it yet…
- A short history
- First time wow factor…
- …later regret.
- Future vision
- What’s it like, then?
- Conclusions and learning
A short history
The camera on the T68i was… not great. Even by 2002, digital cameras were far more advanced and we were used to pretty decent images coming out of one or even two megapixel digital compacts by that point. 640 x 480 resolution aside, the complete inability to resolve any kind of detail that would be considered reasonable these days made the “Communicam” next to useless. You could take pictures that were distinguishable in perfect light, but forget using it in the pub to record your latest night out.
Connectivity was an issue back then too. To get your pictures off the phone you could bluetooth them to a computer if you had an adapter. No desktops back then came with bluetooth built in, but some laptops did as we’ll find out later. Failing that you could email or send an MMS from the T68i but at a significant cost, of course. Most people resorted to using the camera to just make new pictures that could be used as the background for your posh new colour phone screen.
Using these pictures as your background raised another issue in that despite the picture being low resolution, the screen was 6x lower resolution and so some impressive resizing had to take place which invariably reduced your image to a blocky mess. Even so, a fire had been lit. This was a serious novelty and being able to take pictures anywhere, any time on a device that you were always going to have with you was a very attractive proposition. If only it was just a little bit better and at least integrated in the phone so you didn’t have to carry an accessory around with you.
First time wow factor…
I loved my T68i, it had a really novel design for the time and was the first phone to pry me away from the then industry standard Nokia ecosystem. In 1999, you either had a Nokia or nothing, no other phone manufacturers were even worth a look in as their phones were huge, horrible things with God awful user interfaces. Nokia had smashed usability and their predictive text system had recruited a generation of dedicated teenage text message addicts who weren’t going to jump ship until something much better came along. They had such a lead in the market and were so huge that imagining a world where they didn’t rule the mobile phone world was sheer insanity. They were “too big to fail.”
But, fail they did and the writing was on the wall for Nokia after stumbling with several radical designs that no one asked for. Other companies were gradually chipping away, innovating and pushing out new phones with compelling designs and feature sets. Sony, with their unique joystick controller, were one such company and had designed a decent, user friendly, icon based interface that used a combination of numeric keypad input and the occasional nudge of this stick left or right to choose alternative words when writing those all important SMS messages. It was quick, intuitive, smart and pretty impressive in how well it worked out what you meant to write even after a few pints. Until your joystick started to fail through overuse there really wasn’t much reason to upgrade.
Well, there wasn’t until someone showed me their Somy T610i. This was apparently new and improved in every way with it’s bigger, longer screen and built in camera. However, I wasn’t completely sold until they turned the camera on and then I was convinced. For the first time, I saw a true “camera phone” in action with that bigger screen for preview, and faster refresh rate it seemed really good. Within a week I’d gone down the local phone shop and signed up for a contract that I probably couldn’t really afford as a student.
…later regret.
If I’d paused, just for a few minutes, I’d have taken the time to read the technical specs. They didn’t make great reading. My previous T68i with its bolt on camera had VGA 640×480 images, the newer, better T610 had upped that resolution to a mind boggling 352×288!
Wait, have you missed a zero off somewhere? No. No that’s not a mistake. By integrating the camera, Sony had decided that the trade off would be an almost halving of the available resolution. How small is a 352×288 image? This small:
Check out that barrel distortion, this is a camera of formidable quality… To put this in context, the T610 was released mid to late 2003, here’s a picture of my actual T610 from 2003, taken on my then digital compact – a Canon Digital Ixus which was also released at the same time. Incidentally, I think the crack in the plastic screen cover was caused by falling off my bike…
In short, we were used to better. So what was the point in owning a camera phone at that time? Honestly? Really? None. We knew it, too.
These phones were basically proofs of concept that you could buy and get excited over as an early adopter of new tech. It is so easy to forget how utterly amazing some of the features contained in this phone were. Being able to send an email from a phone instead of a PC was utterly, utterly mind blowing in 2002-3. The first phone I ever owned which had that feature was a Sony J-70, a superb phone with a beautiful, well thought out user interface and control wheel combination. Sending and receiving email required access to the first form of internet for mobile phones – WAP, which was awful yet such a novelty, even if it did cost you approximately £1 per second. This was the future, and it was in your hands.
Future vision
Mobile phone manufacturers had grand ambitions for their devices during this era but neither the technology nor network infrastructure existed to quite realise those dreams in any sensible way. Looking back now, all the building blocks of smartphones were there – colour screens, integrated cameras, internet connectivity (just) and downloadable games. We had an entirely different relationship with phones back then and I think that it was a far more healthy one. Of course, we’d send a lot of text messages but other than that, there wasn’t really a reason to pick them up unless you had a specific reason to. We weren’t bombarded with endless notifications and doom scrolling just didn’t exist.
In terms of photography, it was really common in 2003 to carry around one of the new generation of super compact digital cameras. There really was something for everyone and the quality of photographs they produced were more than acceptable. Of course, what we didn’t realise then was that there was a missing piece of the puzzle – sharing or displaying these pictures was still relatively difficult.
No mobile phone was capable of displaying a 5 megapixel image, let alone sending or receiving one. Digital photos lived on laptops and desktops, social media didn’t exist in any form and printing was an expense and effort that most people didn’t bother with. This was the era of amassing huge amounts of images from various holidays, events and nights out and then neatly organising them on your hard drive before forgetting about them. The only viable way of sharing images was the then ubiquitous MSN Messenger and that still confined you to keeping everything on a PC.
Whether we realised it or not, we were still holding the future in our hands. By 2003 we all knew the unforgiving, rapid pace of development in digital technology meant that it was only a matter of time before phones would become more powerful, the cameras better and the sharing problem would be solved – even if it did still cost a small fortune per message.
What’s it like, then?
Every now and again, it’s nice to take a journey right back to where it all began. We did this some time ago with the Casio QV-10 – that’s a camera that not only holds a rightful place in photography history as the first usable, affordable consumer compact camera but is also quite charming and fun to use. Whilst that camera also produces small, low quality images, there’s a certain charm to them and the lack of quality can be forgiven due to it genuinely being one of the first digital cameras – there was nothing better.
The T610 is different, I knew it wasn’t great when I bought it way back when, but using it again definitely brings back just how… nuanced it was. Taking pictures is simplicity itself – press the dedicated camera button on the side of the phone and press capture when you’re ready. It is amusing that Apple celebrated their dedicated camera button as some kind of revolution, I could only smile when I saw same thing on the side of the T610.
Taking the picture takes two to three seconds from the moment you press “capture” and then you’re asked if you want to save. Saving takes another three or so seconds, there is no such thing as continuous capture mode and certainly no ability to shoot video. There are a minimal set of options in the camera application itself, you can apply a few filters and turn “night mode” on and off. Night mode is not great, to put it politely, and just cranks up the noise to an unacceptable level. Nice if you like emulating the interference you used to get when tuning an old analogue TV.
The camera suffers from an offset between the saved image and the preview. The final image includes more information than you’d framed on the right hand side and I think this is down to the fact they overlaid the user interface at the bottom of the screen which cuts part of the preview off. The final image is then resized for the “do you want to save this” preview. This is fairly critical, when you’ve only got 300 or so pixels to play with, each one will count towards getting something that’s recognisable out of the other end.
Once you’ve collated a few masterpieces, it’s time to get them off the phone for viewing. Back in 2003 you could’ve done this via MMS but I neither wanted to top up the sim card I had to use just to get the phone working, nor pay for even more compressed versions of these images. Next up is email, but the connectivity no longer works. You could try infra-red if you were feeling particularly sadistic and that then leaves only one viable option if you don’t have the dedicated PC data cable (which is extortionate these days) – Bluetooth.
Bluetooth was a big deal when this phone was released and certainly introduced a really handy way to connect phones to each other locally. The T610 came with a game built in called “Mini Golf” which was a brilliantly addictive game in itself, but it had a killer feature – local multiplayer over Bluetooth. The amount of university lectures that were ruined by that feature…
I could get the T610 to see my modern laptop and the phone could see the laptop in return, I could even pair the devices, but file transfer was an absolute failure. The T610 uses the very earliest Bluetooth standard and its fair to say that things have moved on significantly in the last twenty years so I had to go digging for anything old I had which also had Bluetooth. This isn’t as simple as it sounds, Bluetooth was not a feature on desktops at all back in 2003 and none of my old desktop computers have it built in. I did, however, have an old IBM Thinkpad X41 which just so happened to have it as standard. I was in luck.
Each JPG image is tiny, around 11 or 12kb in total (thats less than a second of music if you were streaming a song). The transfers are quick but laborious as you cannot select multiple images on the phone itself, nor does the Windows 7 built in Bluetooth file utility allow multiple files to be accepted. If you’d filled your phone with images and decided to back them up, you’d have been much better off buying the dedicated data cable and connecting it to the bundled software that came with each of these phones.
Whilst it was fun to dig out some more period correct hardware that I’d kept in the “just in case, you never know” pile, the disappointment in the final images was real. I knew they weren’t great, but I hadn’t remembered just how miserable the quality of these images could be. I did contemplate getting hold of the T68i and the plug in camera to do a side by side comparison but the prices of those phones now are absurd. In fact, if you thought the prices of classic cameras were getting stupid, wait until you search ebay for an old phone you once owned that genuinely is totally useless now. That’s a surprise and a half waiting for you right there.
Conclusions and learning
We might feel like we’ve come a long way in terms of mobile photography, and of course we have, but I think at present we are bumping up against physics – you can’t change how light or tiny sensors behave beyond a certain point. Countless times we’ve read how new discoveries in lens technology (like liquid lenses, remember those?) are going to change the world and overcome the limitations and constraints that thin, small devices like phones present. However, unless some significant breakthrough occurs, the improvements from now on are going to be very small and incremental in nature.
Today, if you compare even the best flagship phone cameras from Google, Samsung and Apple to even the cheapest SLR, the difference in image quality is significant. The latest iPhone 16 Pro exhibits a surprising amount of softness especially in night or low light shots. Viewed on a phone screen, they look amazing, but on a computer screen at full size, their secrets start to be revealed. Improvements in mobile photography are increasingly being made in software rather than hardware. Whilst lenses have got wider, camera humps slightly deeper and sensors slightly wider, unless phone designers embrace larger or movable optics, things are not going to improve much further on the hardware side.
Moving forwards we will see more and more emphasis being placed on “AI” in phones. Features like predictive focus and shutter, automatic removal of unwanted objects in a scene, scene detection, pre-emptive shutter and so forth will all become embedded. Where we go from there is up for debate, just how many features do we need our mobile cameras to have that we don’t already have access to? If you can make a 4k, cinematic movie with a modern phone, we’re doing pretty well.
As for the T610, from a photographic perspective it is firmly best left in the past. From a mobile phone perspective it’s actually quite refreshing. I’m not suggesting I’d ditch my smartphone any time soon, sadly the number of times it’s handy to have maps and a web browser anywhere you might be make it too useful to sensibly give up, but using this phone did make me miss a time when things were a little less chaotic in terms of connectivity with the wider world.
These phones are from an exciting period in technology history, a time when things were genuinely exciting, the next new thing was usually a big deal and there was plenty of innovation and development happening. Wonderful though modern phones and their cameras are, I do miss having something cool to look forward to. I do wonder what the next “big thing” will be, but it’s out there, somewhere, lurking in someone’s mind.
I’ll be back in twenty years time to do an iPhone 16 retrospective…
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