Finding the Camera Phone Creator
Back in July of this year, analyst Jon Peddie was on a mission to find the inventor of the camera phone — a product category that is responsible for a significant portion of the current mobile phone boom. Peddie found the first camera phone, but couldn’t identify the precise inventor, and wasn’t sure if there even was a single person who could be found. TG Daily picked up where Peddie left off — and got lucky in Japan. (Seems it was not Sharp’s J-SH04 after all! — Ed.)
Internet sources, including Wikipedia, typically suggest that it was Sharp’s J-SH04 that won the race for the first camera phone. Even if Sharp claims on its website that this was the first mobile phone with an “attached camera,” it debuted months after the real first camera phone.
The Sharp device was released in November 2000, but, according to Peddie’s article published in the July 18 issue of his firm’s “Tech Watch”, the Samsung Anycall SCH-V200 had been available already in April of 2000.
But the Samsung wasn’t the first, by a long shot. In the end, it turned out that the first camera phone was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, which was released in May of 1999 in Japan.
Full article here.
Update – All Praise the WayBack Machine – still available via Internet Archive!