An Ordeal With A Camera Phone

Written by James Fohl

You know, if you look around a lot of people have cell phones. A lot of these cell phones have built in cameras that allow you to take pictures. I remember waiting several months for my cell phone contract to expire so that I could go and purchase a new cell phone. I knew for months that I wanted to get a nice camera phone to take pictures of whatever I saw fit.

When the time came, I went to the local dealer to pick up my new camera phone. At the time, it was the top of the line camera phone that my service provider had, and of course it was priced for a pretty penny.

After I let the battery charge, I remember anxiously going around and taking pictures with my cell phone. I had to be really careful because my camera phone did have a camera, but it lacked a flash, which pretty much cut the usefulness of the camera in half.

I did not let this stop me though, because I figured even without the flash I would be able to still take a lot of great pictures without carrying around my bulky digital camera. It took me about two days of snapping a few pictures that I soon realized that my top of the line camera phone could only hold twenty images.

Geez, I thought to myself when I read the manual to make sure the phone wasn’t making a mistake when it displayed “Memory Full!”. Even at the lowest camera setting, the maximum amount of pictures that I could take with my new top of the line camera phone was still a measly twenty pictures.

“That’s okay” I thought to myself. I figured that I would just transfer the pictures to my computer or upgrade the memory card. Unfortunately, there was no memory card accessible in the camera, and the connection cable to connect the phone to my computer was never released to my dealer.

At this point I was kind of mad. I talked to one of the sale representatives at the cell phone dealer, and was told that the only way I could get the pictures off of my phone was to email them in a text message. I was later told that this was twenty five cents per picture.

Now, after hearing this I was mad. I spent several months waiting to get a camera phone, and even though I purchased the top of the line model, I still received something that didn’t even live up to half of my expectations. When I gave in and spent a five dollars transferring my photos to my computer, I quickly realized that the quality of the camera’s images really paled in comparison with my digital camera.

And so I learned the hard way that a camera phone is really a novelty item to have, but you just can not expect one to take the place of your digital camera.