The J-SH04 was a

mobile phone A mobile phone or cell phone is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones ( landline phones). This rad ...

made by

Sharp Corporation is a Japanese electronics company. It is headquartered in Sakai, Osaka, and was founded by Tokuji Hayakawa in 1912 in Honjo, Tokyo, and established as the Hayakawa Metal Works Institute in Abeno-ku, Osaka, in 1924. Since 2016, it is majority o ...

and released by J-Phone ( SoftBank Mobile). It was only available in

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

, and was released in November 2000. It was Japan's second phone with a built-in, back-facing

camera A camera is an instrument used to capture and store images and videos, either digitally via an electronic image sensor, or chemically via a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. As a pivotal technology in the fields of photograp ...

. It has a 110,000 pixel

CMOS Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss ", , ) is a type of MOSFET, metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) semiconductor device fabrication, fabrication process that uses complementary an ...

image sensor and a 256 color display. The phone weights 74g, and its dimensions are 127 × 39 × 17 mm. It was succeeded by the J-SH05 flip phone, which was released just one month later. It is also considered to be one of the first phones with

polyphonic Polyphony ( ) is a type of musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice ( monophony) or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ...

ringtones A ringtone is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming telephone call. Originally referring to the sound of electromechanical striking of bells or gongs, the term refers to any sound by any device alerting of an incoming call. On p ...

. While the J-SH04 popularized the concept of a camera phone (branded as Sha-Mail) and was the world's first fully integrated camera and telephone over a cellular mobile network, it had a number of predecessors. In December 1997, Kyocera released the VP-110, which was a PCMCIA videophone adapter with an 80,000-pixel CCD camera that swiveled 210° and attached to the DataScope DS-110 and DS-320 mobile phones. Kyocera released the first commercial mobile camera-phone in September 1999, the VP-210 Visual Phone which had a front-facing 110,000-pixel CMOS camera enabling both video calling and sending photos over the air. The VP-210 could send its still images as mail attachments or send video at 2 frames per second over a PHS network. In contrast, the J-SH04's camera on the back of the phone was designed to take photos facing away from the user, which was a more popular way to use digital cameras at the time than video calling and selfie photos. The SH04 was the transformational moment for the camera phone. Samsung's SCH-V200 phone equipped with a VGA camera was released in South Korea several months before the J-SH04. The Samsung SCH-V200's camera was inside the same case as the phone and used the same battery and memory, but it was not integrated with the phone function. It could not convey an image "at a distance," which some regard as part of the definition of a "camera phone." Instead, photos taken by the SCH-V200 had to be transferred to a PC in order to be sent over a network.

References

External links

* http://k-tai.impress.co.jp/cda/article/showcase_top/3913.html
The first photo sent from a phone
BBC Witness History Sharp Corporation mobile phones {{mobile-phone-stub