Inventing The Future, 2000-Style

I was posting about Pocket PC Thoughts' 8th anniversary today, and courtesy of Archive.org - I'm so grateful those guys do what they do - I saw this post I made back in October of 2000:

"Imagine a digital camera running Windows CE. Imagine snapping pictures and having them automatically emailed to you via a Bluetooth chip on the camera that talks to your cell phone on your hip. Storage becomes a thing of the past - the CF card in the camera is more of a buffer for your cell phone than anything else. Or imagine having a built-in FTP program that would automatically push your images up to a web site as you're shooting them - real-time photography and events coverage could usher in a new era of photo journalism. Raw, unedited, up to the second coverage. Imagine having Pocket Artist on your camera - you could crop, edit, and tweak your images before uploading/emailing them. The possibilities are so endless here - if anyone has any upper-management contacts with Kodak, Olymus, Nikon, or any other major digital camera OEM, tell them I want to speak to them."

I thought that was interesting for a couple of reasons. First, because eight years later, we still don't have cameras with rich operating systems supporting third-party software applications for - although we do have some cameras that can do WiFi directly off the camera itself, and of course we have hardware such as the Eye-Fi. We have some DSLRs with expensive add-ons to provide WiFi, but virtually no cameras that bridge into PDAs or smartphones.

WiFi is great, but only if you're within range of a WiFi network. Why, in 2008, are there still no cameras that tap into the cellular network using our smartphones to upload images? Bluetooth is the most logical way to do this, and while I often find Bluetooth to be a bit of nightmare, when it's implemented properly it can work really well. Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR gives us about 3 mbps, which is fast enough to upload a 3 MB image in about eight seconds (theoretically at least). That's enough speed to make it viable, and in this era of social networking and instant broadcasting of content, there'd certainly be a demand for real-time photo galleries on Facebook, MySpace, and personal blogs. So why isn't anyone doing this?