Link: Sam­sung SCG-S260 Super­im­pos­ing Cam­er­a­phone : Giz­modo.

Samsung’s SCG-S260 cell phone lets you dab­ble in com­posit­ing, allow­ing you to super­im­pose a hand­writ­ten note over another image. Just snap a shot of your note and your back­ground image and let it work its magic.

Samsung’s tech­nol­ogy part­ner has not been dis­closed, but they might be part­ner­ing with French start-up RealEyes3D, whose Phone2Fun prod­uct fam­ily “allows cam­era phones users to send hand-written mes­sages with text, draw­ings or pre-printed information”.

In the­ory, this should make send­ing MMS more com­pelling … but in prac­tice it’ll be an uphill battle:

• Cur­rently, about 2 Bil­lion SMS are being sent per month in France, com­pared to 25 Mil­lion MMS per year. Send­ing a pic­ture is com­pelling enough rea­son to use an MMS and the real block­age is the cost of send­ing one, not the lack of fun fea­tures. Send­ing an SMS costs a frac­tion of what it costs to send an MMS.
• Besides high pric­ing, oper­a­tors are equally noto­ri­ous for poor mar­ket­ing. Sam­sung cam­er­a­phones already sell well with­out this fea­ture, which the user will per­ceive as a nice gimmick.
• Now, pic­ture a sales­man at a retail store doing a demo and sell­ing this ser­vice as a key ser­vice (see pic­ture above): “let’s find a piece of paper” … “where’s my pen” … “ok, now I’ll write some­thing cute” … “I need to take a pic­ture of what I just wrote” … “ok, now let me take a pic­ture of you” … “smile” … “now, let’s com­bine your pic­ture with the note I scrib­bled” … “see how easy that was?!“

  Not! How many such demos do you think a sales­man will do before he stops telling prospects about the nifty feature? 

More promis­ing is RealEyes3D’s new Digitizer3 (“Dig­i­tizer cubed”) prod­uct, a cam­era phone doc­u­ment scan­ner
ser­vice for busi­ness users.

Update 7/3/05:

Samsung’s part­ner is indeed RealEyes3d, accord­ing to this press state­ment released the day fol­low­ing my post:

Realeyes3D, the pio­neer in hand­writ­ten mes­sag­ing and other embed­ded appli­ca­tions and con­tent ser­vices for cam­era phones, today announced the world-premiere avail­abil­ity of hand­writ­ten mes­sag­ing on Samsung’s SCH-S260 hand­set, released in Korea. This launch fol­lows the sign­ing of an exten­sive global agree­ment, under which Sam­sung has licensed Realeyes3D’s w-Postcard™ and Dig­i­tizer™ hand­writ­ten mes­sag­ing appli­ca­tions for inte­gra­tion as stan­dard fea­tures in its cam­era phones.

That’s great news for RealEyes3D. To appre­ci­ate the con­text of adding such fea­tures to MMS, The Fea­ture pub­lished an arti­cle last year regard­ing the lack of suc­cess of WAP and MMS. Accord­ing to the article:

“WAP and MMS failed to meet expec­ta­tions because ser­vices were designed by … ‘default think­ing,’ a clichéd and unques­tioned mind­set
that com­bines “a weak col­lec­tion of axioms of design, broad mar­ket
visions, or rules of exe­cu­tion that aren’t clearly artic­u­lated. This
col­lec­tion exists in the back­ground, much like the assump­tion that
grav­ity exists .…

It is pos­si­ble to cre­ate quite a com­plex MMS, one that includes not
only a pic­ture but sound and text as well. This has clear value as a
gift. There could be a small study in the gift giv­ing groups to see
how they would respond to pho­tos as gifts…”

In other words, the inno­v­a­tive w-Postcard appli­ca­tion from RealEyes3D adds a more com­pelling con­text to send pho­tos by MMS. Admit­tedly, it is not touted as a killer appli­ca­tion meant to boost MMS mes­sages. Nev­er­the­less, whether w-Postcard is com­pelling enough for peo­ple to use under cur­rent high MMS pric­ing by oper­a­tors remains to be seen.

Full dis­clo­sure:

I inter­viewed with RealEyes3D in Octo­ber 2004.

Tech­no­rati Tags: cam­er­a­phone, sam­sung,