Sending photos through your cell phone

IDC estimates that the shipment of image-enabled handheld devices will jump from 610,000 units this year to 11 million in 2006. How they come up with these figures is simply beyond me. The truth is, in countries such as South Korea where the 3G service is available, people have been able to send not only still images over their cellular network but even live videos.

If you live in a country where 3G is still a distant dream, can you send photos using your cell? Because a 100 KB still image requires a lot of bandwidth to send, you have to subscribe to at least a 2.5G service, such as the one offered by IM3. Telkomsel will also soon offer the GPRS service, which will provide adequate bandwidth for sending photos as well.

What do you need? Ideally, you should have a cell with a built-in camera such as the Sony Ericsson P800 or the Nokia 7650. With these cameras, you can capture the picture that you want to share. The receiving phone does not have to have a built-in camera, but it should support what is called the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). More than just an SMS, an MMS may contain an audio clip, graphics and an image in addition to text.

What happens if you send a photo to a friend who does not yet have an MMS-capable phone? "His operator will know that he will not be able to see the photo on his cell phone, so the operator will simply forward an SMS to his cell and give him the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) where he can pick up the picture," said Kendro Hendra, the managing director for InTouch, a company that has developed various advanced mobile services in Indonesia.

That is because each time a photo is sent it is stored in a server and a special type of SMS, called bio-messaging, will be quietly sent to your recipient's MMS-capable cell phone to instruct him or her to retrieve the photo from the server.

The entire process happens in the background, and the recipient finds out about it when he receives notification informing him that a multimedia message has arrived for him. When he opens the message, the photo is in his cell. If your recipient is using a legacy cell phone, he will only receive a URL and a password that he will have to use to access the image.

But what if you are in Jakarta and you want to send a picture of the final result of the recent billion-rupiah beautification project of the Hotel Indonesia fountain to your friend in Rome, so that he can compare it with the Fontana di Trevi?

An application and its supporting network that allows you to send a data file of the captured image to a designated printer in Vienna is being developed by InTouch.

The local printer there will print the image on a postcard, print your friend's address, which you attached to the picture, and perhaps a short explanation of what you want him to do with the photo. They will then affix the necessary postage and take it to the local post office.

Costs are minimal as the transmission of an image file is done over the Internet and the postage costs the same for all countries inside the European Union. Another good thing is the picture will arrive at your friend's address the next day, much faster than if you were to send the postcard directly from Jakarta.

The service, which is called AirCards, is intended for those who do not have an e-mail address or who do not check their e- mail inbox regularly. "It is also for those who want to have a print to hang on to, rather than a soft copy of a photo," said Kendro. If your friend is online, the cheapest way is to download the image from your cell phone using its infrared or Bluetooth connection to your PC, and send it as an e-mail attachment to your friend.

Kendro said InTouch was in finalizing agreements with a number of printers in various places, including Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan, U.K. and the U.S., to provide worldwide service. Payments can be made through your GSM operator -- if it provides AirCard billing, or with vouchers that you can purchase from AirCards.

In June, the AirCards service went on a trial run in Singapore, with 100 selected subscribers of M1 participating with loaned Nokia 7650 cell phones, because the application is included with this new phone. It will soon be launched commercially here and we will then have the service in Jakarta as well. But do not plan to send any pornographic, racist or other offending images through AirCards, as the company reserves the right to reject them.

-- Zanti Arbi