Memo to US cellphone providers: Stop being stingy!
As of now, unless you've got a sweet smartphone with a memory card slot, pretty much the only way to get photos off of a cameraphone here in the States is to transfer it over the network by email or MMS. Why? Because the wireless carriers can charge people for the privilege of being able to email photos or post them to the web, and don't want to make it too easy to transfer photos to a PC using a cable or a memory card (some carriers even disable this feature on phones with Bluetooth). This isn't the end of the world with the crappy, throwaway images we have now (it's not like you want to archive every single grainy 640x480 picture, do you?), but over at Forbes.com Tony Henning argues that this will be completely unacceptable (and bandwidth restrictive) once we start getting our hands on the higher-resolution cameraphones everyone else in the world seems to be enjoying. When cameraphones can start taking decent pictures it's only a matter of time until people start to ask whether there's any point in buying one that they can't use more or less like a regular digital camera.
