The J-SH04 was a

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whi ...

made by

Sharp Corporation is a Japanese multinational corporation that designs and manufactures electronic products, headquartered in Sakai-ku, Sakai, Osaka Prefecture. Since 2016 it has been majority owned by the Taiwan-based Foxconn Group. Sharp employs more t ...

and released by

J-Phone is a Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo which focuses on investment management. The Group primarily invests in companies operating in technology, energy, and financial sectors. It also runs ...

( SoftBank Mobile). It was only available in

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

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

camera A camera is an optical instrument that can capture an image. Most cameras can capture 2D images, with some more advanced models being able to capture 3D images. At a basic level, most cameras consist of sealed boxes (the camera body), with ...

. It has a 110,000 pixel

CMOS Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSF ...

image sensor and a 256

color display A display device is an output device for presentation of information in visual or tactile form (the latter used for example in tactile electronic displays for blind people). When the input information that is supplied has an electrical signal th ...

. 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. While the J-SH04 popularized the concept of a camera phone 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 SD-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 other important distinction was the phone itself. The VP-210 was a cordless phone and the SH04 a cellular mobile phone. The camera on a cordless phone failed to take off whereas the camera on a cellular mobile phone succeeded spectacularly. The SH04 was the transformational moment for the camera phone. Samsung's SCH-V200 phone equipped with a

VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the PC industry within three years. The term can now ...

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 Sharp Corporation mobile phones {{mobile-phone-stub