S60 User Experience

September 22, 2006 Mobile camera as much more Posted by at 12:54 PM | Categories: User Experience

Users often comment that they would like to have a good quality mobile phone camera. Usually taking photos is the only consideration...but what about other ways of using the camera?

In some situations the camera could help a user to "take notes". A user could, for example, take a picture of a book cover that her friend recommended (to later look up further information) or capture the opening hours on a shop door. (These could possibly be stored separately from rest of the photos.)

If this does not seem terribly helpful, what about reading 2D barcodes using one's phone camera? There has been some earlier discussion about this in Tommi’s S60 Application Blog. I tried generating and reading Semapedia tags, which is basically phone-readable barcodes that take you to Wikipedia pages.* Quick and easy.

A mobile user perhaps does not need to browse Wikipedia daily, but the idea could be applied to various everyday situations, e.g. being in a movie theater or video rental store and trying to decide which movie to see. It would be handy to read a barcode on a movie list or on a DVD cover and then instantly receive a link to the movie trailer. For some time, several friends have been waiting and hoping for a phone-readable barcode solution to pay their bills.

Other suggestions?

* Semapedia.org is a "non-profit community-driven project to bring the knowledge from Wikipedia to relevant places in physical space".

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I use phone's camera to take picture of white board or presentation slides in a meeting. Well, you may already cover it in "taking notes".

I've been using the digital cameras (regular and mobile phone) to record timetables of busses and trains for quite some time. It's also a handy way to carry a map with you. Just point-and-shoot then zoom-and-scroll.

Yes the semacode application has great potential and we have been in discussions with them to improve the public use of the technology. Just think - in the supermarket, scanning a code on fish to learn its origins and catch date - the applications are endless.

I've used my mobile phone camera to capture pictures/graphs/text etc. on books that cannot be borrowed in school library :)

Good post.

> read a barcode on a movie list or on a DVD cover and
> then instantly receive a link to the movie trailer.

Why don't you ask Finnkino to add a free WLAN access point to Tennispalatsi Helsinki, and print 2D barcodes to the wall (pointing to movie trailers)?

> several friends have been waiting and hoping for a
> phone-readable barcode solution to pay their bills.

Why don't you pitch this idea to a couple of Finnish banks? If they like it, you can give them my email address :)

S60 Open to new features

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