Survey Says “Few” Cameraphone Users Actually Send Photos

by Carlo Longino on 02. May, 2006 in Stats

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Few Consumers Sending Pictures From Camera Phones, says the headline:

Since late 2002, the year camera phones were introduced, the number of users have increased to half of all mobile subscribers, NPD said. Fully 73 percent of the users said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the purchase.

Nevertheless, four out of five camera-phone owners say they leave their pictures in the devices, as if they were portable digital photo albums. As a result, the level of actual photo sharing has been disappointing for carriers.

Is the implied surprise/disappoinment here that so few US users are sending photos, or so many? I think 20 percent’s a pretty good number, considering the track record of MMS. I think the article and the stat also miss the point that cameraphones exist for plenty of reasons beyond sending MMS, such as acting as a digital memory device. But, as I’ve said before, if operators want to get more people sending images from their mobile, there’s a lot of ways they can improve.

[tags]mobile, cameraphones, mms, moblogging, moblogs[/tags]

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  • I can remember an early conversation with the team at Cognima saying that with their application installed on early Camera Phones Orange were experiencing a five/six fold increase in MMS in a trail. However the Operator did not wish to install the software and it was not until ShoZu that users gota system that allows the easy sending of pictures.

    I think the problem is that the Networks are interested only in selling big buckets of minutes and thus are not prepared to invest in product development as a time when they are spending so much on network build out. The problem is that if they are unable to show users what we could use our phones for other than voice were are going to stick with what we know.

    For example I have had the ability to make video calls now for 18 months and in that time I have done so only four times. I few of those in my address book now also have 3G handsets but most do not. The same was true with MMS, when we first tried it it was a failure and so we no longer use the service.
  • Markku Niiranen
    Some suggest that the whole OMA MMS is designed by technically oriented strangers - those odd people we also call engineers. Easy to understand why most end users have failed to set up his/her terminal to sent and receive MMS, not talking about how many of us really knows how much this would then cost.

    Just few weeks ago I bumbed into a tiny nice chat program, available to symbian platform, so I installed it into my GPRS enabled camera phone and gave it a try. Simsalabim! In less than 10 minutes I was connected to my chat friends at Yahoo, AOL and gtalk. The client also provided a great MMI for making shots with my build-in camera & uploading them to my friends. Possessing a camera enabled MMS phone for over 2 years, this was the first moment I felt that sending pictures makes sense, was easy and from the data counter I could understand what were the costs associated using it.

    Will be interesting to see if IMS based applications *coming out the door* can really fix the picture messaging hole left by miss engineered MMS feature. I suggest that after WLAN (at home office) becomes a standard feature of tech-freak's phone, IMS will take off with all nice chatting, streaming, music and picture messaging.
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