Digital Picture Essentials

Your Treo device is equipped with a digital camera located on the back in the upper-left corner. Unlike the digital camera on the Treo 600, the camera on the Treo 650 supports both digital pictures and digital video. You can take as many digital pictures or shoot as much digital video as your device's memory allows. In reality, you'll find that a memory card is essential for using the digital camera.

The Treo's digital camera can take pictures in one of two resolutions: 640x480 or 320x240. If you have any experience with standalone digital cameras, you realize that the Treo's camera is considerably lower-resolution than "pure" cameras. On the other hand, 640x480 is better than many other mobile phones with cameras and is good enough for taking casual pictures when all you have on hand is your Treo.

Note

Some Treo users were disappointed that Palm didn't increase the maximum resolution of the Treo camera in the 650, but you have to remember that a higher-resolution camera requires more memory for storing pictures. Seeing that the 650 already had some memory issues because of the different file system, increasing the camera's memory requirements probably didn't seem like a good idea. Perhaps even more important, wireless service providers wouldn't be too happy about people sending large pictures over relatively limited wireless data connections. You probably won't see significantly higher-resolution cameras on phones until wireless network speeds increase considerably.

The real benefit of including a digital camera on a mobile phone is not so much the quality of the pictures but the flexibility you have in sharing them. It's unlikely that handheld communication devices will ever catch up with standalone digital cameras, but they aren't supposed to. Then again, I don't know of a standalone digital camera that enables you to send pictures wirelessly to friends and family and even publish them directly to a website.

Keep in mind that digital cameras embedded in mobile phones aren't good news to everyone. If you work at a company that is fairly guarded about trade secrets, and most are, you might run into the problem of not being allowed to bring a camera phone into the office. Although camera phones could certainly be misused in a corporate environment, so could numerous other items that are not banned. Besides, if you really want to carry out corporate espionage, you can use plenty of cool spy gadgets that are less conspicuous than a camera phone. Having said all that, however, you might still run into a problem with corporate heavies who think you're going to reenact The Falcon and the Snowman with your Treo and their trade secrets. If you encounter this situation, just buy one of the non-camera Treo devices that are now available. And then promptly jump ahead to the next chapter because you won't be taking any pictures with your non-camera Treo!