There are cellular phones with cameras, and there are cellular phones with MP3 players.
There is also a fierce competition among cell phone manufacturers and wireless network providers to attract customers, and one of the ways in which they do it is to stuff as many technologies into their palm-sized cell phones as the laws of electronics allow, so the merging of the MP3 player and the camera into a single MP camera cell phone was inevitable. But it took some real design ingenuity.
First, MP3 camera cell phones usually have handsets with integrated memory limited to a few hundred megabytes, and offer expandable memory card slots to compensate. Further, their user interfaces can be quite basic, with nothing close to the click wheel on the iPod. And because MP3 camera cell phones are connected to specific carriers, they are also saddled with restrictions regarding the importation music to their MP3 players.
If you are used to a stand-alone MP3, you might find this a bit constricting. Some MP3 camera cell phones will let you download music over the air, but both Spring Nextel and Verizon Wireless have their own music stores from which you can download your songs, for an extra fee. And theirMP3 camers cell phones will only download music in areas offering 3G wireless.
Cameras in cell phones have bee around long enough that they are almost a given, although they still vary enormously in the quality of their pictures. VGA cameras still show up in quite a few MP3 camera cell phones, like the Samsung X640, the LG SV300S, the Nokia 6085, the Sony Ericsson Z310a, and the PanTech C150.
But the trend has been toward megapixel cameras, with the current leader being the 10-megapixel monster Samsung SCH-B600, introduced in 2006 and intended only for the Korean market. The SCH-B600 actually resembled a 10 megapixel camera with an MP3 cell phone welded to its back, but as far as MP3 camera cell phones go, has definitely raised the camera performance bar. Most standard digital cameras do not offer anything close to ten megapixels, and storage of the SDH-B600 photos must be a concern, never mind the bandwidth required to send one of them. Read more about camera cell phones at http://www.highenergymagic.com
It seems somewhat odd that the SCH-B600 MP3 camera cell phone would be offered only in Korea, because when Motorola introduced the RAZR Z slider version of their RAZR MP3 camera cell phone in Korea it did not sell very well. The reason?
The RAZR Z MP3 camera cell phone, when extended, felt large in the average Korean hand, which was much more comfortable with the clam shell design of the original RAZR. And therein lies the biggest problem with any multi-feature cell phones, including MP3 camera cell phones.
The biggest attraction of the cell phone, for many users, is its small size and portability. Cell phone users like to tuck their little buddies safely out of sight when they are not using them, and cell phone designers are severely restricted in the amount of space they have for adding electronic features to the phones. That MP3 camera cell phones exist at all, regardless of their picture or playback quality, is a major accomplishment in the evolution of cell phones!