Better than text?

Picture messaging on mobile phones has taken Japan by storm, but will it be a hit in Britain too? Michael Fitzpatrick reports on the coming camphone revolution

If you're male and your mobile hasn't got an in-built camera you might not get a date with Mariko, or thousands of girls like her. Then again it might be in your favour. Mariko, you have to understand, is a young Tokyo girl who's part prostitute, part racketeer, and she likes to check out the faces of her "dates" by mobile before she goes on a job. "If we can check a guy's face over our cell phones, we know the sort of trustworthy guys that we can hang out with for a while," Mariko told Japan's Weekly Playboy magazine recently.

This rather shocking example is just one of the ways that dinky mobile handsets equipped with cameras are transforming a society that has declared the new phones an indispensable hit. Britons, too, now have their chance to try out picture messaging, two years after its Japanese launch, as camphones make their debut in the UK.

Mainland Europe has had them for a few months now. They are capable of snapping at everything within range, and you can then send the image on as an e-mail attachment. Europeans are bound to find novel ways of using the camphones, but Japan is still leagues ahead when it comes to mobile multimedia.

The Japanese have never been keen on PC-based internet services, finding them too expensive, deskbound and reliant on a non-Japanese Qwerty keyboard. They went for an easy-to-use mobile alternative.

WAP may have been dismal in the rest of the world, but the Japanese were wise enough to build a better system, with better, cheaper phones. The market was also spurred by a demand for ever-more sophisticated extras, while the quick adoption of digital photography in Japan meant that the hybrid camphone was inevitable. But will they catch on here?

"The phones are dramatically cheaper in Japan because of subsidising and the special relationship carriers have with the makers," explains Jim Ryan, head of products at the British network mm02. "They also let the phones get smaller very quickly. And the chances are that like text messages, because of the interaction element, camera phones should take off here, too."

John Delaney, a wireless analyst at independent IT consultant Ovum, agrees, but points out that "it won't be as big as in Japan, as it's much cheaper there to send pictures via mobile."

Arguably, there's no place in the world so dominated by image as Japan, making it a demanding society, visually speaking. The phones they favour are cool-looking bantamweights that can support more text, colours, and larger graphics. Colour screens were introduced soon after the mobile boom took off, and even video-enabled phones are now selling well.

As well as being fun, the picture phones are finding serious applications. Famously well-ordered, Japan has less reported crime than the West, but street crime is rising and investigators are happy to enrol any new help – which is where the camphone, now carried by more than seven million people in Japan, has found a role. Police chiefs in Osaka, the country's second biggest city, recently agreed that citizens could wirelessly e-mail them pictures of suspects if they come across a crime.

The social implications of this could be enormous. Not everyone carries a camera, but the majority now carry a phone, and they are much more discreet. When camphones become the norm some sociologists believe that all public activity will come before the recording lens. For Britons who already feel over-scrutinised by surveillance cameras, any claim to privacy will vanish in a flash of clicking mobiles. Japanese individuals can already act as Little Brother, as some multimedia services can now send movie clips by mobile, too.

Other uses for the camphone can be equally sinister. As you might expect from a land awash with advanced digital photography and voyeurs, some Japanese people have combined their twin passions to such a degree that Japan's female inhabitants can be nervous about wearing a short skirt outdoors. Where tiny spy cameras and watches with digital cameras went before, the dirty mac brigade are now zooming in with their mobiles. One method used by men is to stand behind a woman on an escalator while seeming to check the phone display and pass the phone under the woman's skirt while taking a picture.

Police now fear an escalation of technologically enhanced peeping tommery because women cannot easily detect men filming them; hence some companies such as J-phone make their phones emit an audible "beep" or "click" sound when the photo function is used.

More civilised uses have included the capturing of memorable sports moments – thousands could be seen with their phones held aloft at key World Cup matches. Snapshots can also be shared instantly with friends and family, and as a visual aid to business deals while on the go camphones can be useful.

Vodafone, which follows Orange and T-Mobile today by introducing a picture mail service in the UK, thinks that it knows better than most about the potential impact camphones will have on our lives. After all, it owns J-phone, the company that launched the first such service in Japan. J-phone now only sells camera-equipped models, and half of its 12 million subscribers own camera phones. Its links to Japan mean that Vodafone has also been privileged to take part in what some observers see as a social revolution, as the world's most savvy consumers reorganise their lives around their new idol – the mobile.

Vodafone thinks that could happen here, and so has ordered three million of the same camphone handsets made by Sharp that the Japanese favour. For the moment, though, Europeans will be stuck with the clunkier offerings from Nokia and its like.

The service in Europe is also much more expensive than in Japan, at around 30p to 40p to send a picture – compared with 3p in Japan. The European service does handle higher quality images, though not for much longer. Cell-phone makers in the Far East are already launching cheaper camphones with flash, zoom and more pixels, presenting a wake-up call for US and European handset makers. The competition, says Ryan, should bring down the price of the handsets here which now sell in Britain for around £300 without a contract – though often less than £200 for the phone and camera with a contract.

After reality failed to match the hype for WAP and GPRS, the mobile operators will be praying hard that picture messaging will be as big a hit as its text forebear. Perhaps it will – while few people can see the benefits of a bad version of the internet in your hand (aka WAP), an omnipresent camera-cum-e-mail-enabled phone has many clear ones; ask Mariko and her more virtuous compatriots.