A camera phone is a mobile phone that incorporates a small digital video and photo camera, and can store these images in the phone’s internal memory and share them with other devices via wired or wireless networks. More than half of all mobile phones in the world today are camera phones.

Although there have been landline videophones for several decades, the first cell phone capable of transmitting, receiving, and displaying digital images was a prototype device called the Intellect, which was designed in 1993 by American inventor Daniel A. Henderson. The Intellect was essentially a handheld mobile phone with a large, high-resolution monochrome screen, which could display images and video files that had been transmitted by a computer connected to a wireless transmitter. Many of the technologies and data transfer protocols pioneered by Henderson are still used today, in our modern camera phones.

Other early experiments with wireless image sharing in conjunction with mobile telephony included Apple’s videophone/PDA in 1995, and various prototype digital camera/mobile phone combinations demonstrated by Kodak and Olympus in the mid-1990s. One of these devices was capable of connecting to the Internet wirelessly, which proved to be a crucial development as it enabled instant media sharing with anyone, regardless of their location.

However, it was not long before a bright spark, namely Philippe Kahn of the Lightsurf companies in the US, invented a mobile image-sharing structure, and the first camera phone to make use of this was the Sharp J-SH04, which was developed in the late 1990s and received a commercial release in 2001 in Japan.

Needless to say, the camera phone turned out to be a huge success and by 2006, more than half of all mobile phones in circulation were camera phones, spelling the end of two of the world’s leading camera manufacturers. , Minolta and Konica.

As of early 2009, there were more than two billion camera phones in circulation worldwide.

Images taken by citizen journalists with camera phones have even begun to appear on major television news bulletins. The first major international breaking news story to use camera phone footage in this way was the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2005.

This is expected to become a more common occurrence as time goes on and camera phones become even more ubiquitous.