When we talked about why we like the Nokia N80, we digressed a little into the uses of cameraphones, and we'd like to point you to a post by 43folders which is an elaboration upon the idea that cameraphones are extremely useful as information reproduction devices.
There's still a problem afterwards, however, because now you have a huge mass of pictures ...
When we talked about why we like the Nokia N80, we digressed a little into the uses of cameraphones, and we'd like to point you to a post by 43folders which is an elaboration upon the idea that cameraphones are extremely useful as information reproduction devices.
There's still a problem afterwards, however, because now you have a huge mass of pictures which have to be laboriously scrolled through, even if folders are properly used.
What then? The most immediate answer (for Windows Mobile Smartphones users, anyway) might be the upcoming OneNote Mobile.
OneNote developer Chris Pratley opines that it's killer feature is is "photo note taking" where photographs taken are automatically OCR'ed and rendered searchable. We don't like the sync requirement, but that idea is sound.
It is not, however, a new idea. We wrote about extending OCR technology to phones in January, and Xerox even made the news in november 2004 stating that it had developed cameraphone technology that allows users to scan and transmit documents using powerful document imaging software residing on the handset. Unfortunately, no truly viable commercial implementation of this sort of technology exists yet, but perhaps that's expected.
The simple alternative, actually, might be to allow arbitrary metadata - better know as tags, or simply categories. OneNote implicitly supports this, (I think - if you can embed a photo into a note, you can add any textual information about the photo into the note, and this text will be be searchable.) but what we need now is for Symbian (or Nokia's S60 team or whomever) to implement this in their photo gallery application.
Pretty please?
We'd like OCR too, but are very understanding. ;)
