You cannot compare a cameraphone to a digital camera. The phones will loose every time. I agree with all your points. You cannot deny however, that 10s of billions of dollars are spent on camerphones every year and every self respecting gadget guy with a blog about gadgets would be remiss if he didn’t talk about them.

you can see the few video i took at an Aerosmith concert at http://www.tixxalert.blogspot.com

I believe Thought, in his column on BlackBerry Cool, stated that aound 500 millinon of the 600 million mobile phones sold in 2005 have digital cameras.

However - a little known fact: The CAMERA (and I think the memory card feature) can be DISABLED by your company, via the Blackberry Enterprise Server. And I don’t think the blackberry’s security model has been cracked. So it would be POSSIBLE for RIM to standardize on Camera only models, and just allow companies that don’t want Cameras and memory cards (both considered to be security holes) to disable them as soon as they enable the device’s in the business’s email system.

Would allow rim to standardize their manufacturing on a small number of models, and still sell devices to the security-minded organizations.

Although I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep camera only models on the market, even if they are only sold directly to government agencies and other paranoid organizations.

RIM makes most of its money on handset sales. They NEEDED a camera phone to be competitive.

With any consumer product line you never want your audience to just kind of forget about you for a while; you always want to keep their attention going back to you.

I wouldn’t go as far as Rob to and say that the overwhelming majority of business people with mobile devices have cameraphones, but I would say probably more do than don’t.

Rob,

I have done a bit of an informal study for you. I just asked about 20 people or so that sit in the cubes near me to raise their phones up in the air if they are on the company plan. I counted 16 phones. I then asked people with cameraphones to put there phones down. Only 7 phones went down, however, 7 of the remaining 9 were BlackBerrys. 7 of 9 non BlackBerrys were cameraphones…

I will give you that most people that have cameraphones regardless of if they use them for business or not rarely take pictures with them.

Since I don’t have a reference or a quote about just how many camera phones are out there, take my comment as an opinion and insert “I believe” or “I think” where appropriate.

I’ll agree that many business people carry camera phones and that some even use them for business purposes, but I would be willing to bet that those phones are personal phones and are used only for the convience of the person that is carrying it, and not provided or required by their company. Few companies, other than those that may deal with the need for transmission of field photos will provide company phones with cameras. Additionally, it’s only been recently that major corporations have allowed camera phones on their property.

Thank you

Even that will change, however, over the next few years.