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It wasn't so long ago that a few hundred kilobytes of memory space, with room to store 300 telephone numbers, was considered satisfactory for a cellular telephone. But in these days of the wireless Internet, embedded cameras, and Java applets that won't cut it any more, as Sharp has demonstrated with its latest handset for the Japanese market.

The J-SH09, which will go on sale in August for Japan's J-Phone, packs an impressive 5MB of memory and is one of the most fully featured camera-equipped cell phones to hit the market.

"This is without question the most memory we have put in a cell phone," says Matthew Nicholson, a spokesperson for J-Phone. "The nearest is a Kenwood model which has 3MB, and then the JT07 by Toshiba, which has approximately 2MB."

"This model is very good at taking pictures so that is one of reasons [for the large memory]," says Nicholson, adding that the phone can hold around 1,000 images taken in the "basic" photography mode.

That mode allows users to take pictures at either 120 by 160 pixel, 120 by 128 pixel, or 60 by 80 pixel images for display on the main screen, on a 'sub-display' on the outside of the phone, or for e-mailing to other phones.

Added Features

Additionally, the handset has several features not usually found on camera phones. These include a VGA mode for taking higher quality images that will be displayed later on a personal computer; and an action snap mode, which takes up to 10 seconds of motion video and audio for playback on the phone.

In addition to the generous memory and the three picture modes, the phone also sports a 310,000 pixel CCD, allowing it to take VGA resolution (640 by 480 pixel) images. This is an upgrade to previous models not only in terms of resolution but also in quality, because CCD pickups deliver a generally better image than the CMOS sensors used in most camera phones.

The CCD is around five times more sensitive than the CMOS sensor in Sharp's previous model, which J-Phone says makes it possible to take pictures with candlelight illumination. It also has a macro function that allows for images to be taken from as near as two inches from the subject.

Other features include a 2.1-inch main TFT LCD and a 0.9-inch GF color LCD sub-display on the outside of the case, both capable of displaying 65,536 colors. The phone weighs 3.6 ounces and can provide 130 minutes of talk time and 350 hours of standby time.

Just for fun, the handset also features a "Disney" mode which sets the ring-tone, display wallpaper, and other tones to a Disney theme.

Paying the Price

All of this doesn't come cheap. Sharp has set a suggested retail price of $420 for the telephone, although with carrier subsidies it is likely to sell for slightly less.

While the cell phone will only be sold in Japan and won't work anywhere else in the world, it does provide consumers overseas with a tantalizing glimpse into what may be available in the near future. Vodafone Group, the parent company of J-Phone, is planning to launch camera phones and a picture mail service in several European countries later this year, and the U.K.'s mmO2 has already placed an order for camera phones with Sharp.

When J-Phone first launched its picture mail service in Japan in November 2000, few people took the 'Sha-Mail' service seriously. However, the carrier soon had a major hit on its hands. By March of this year more than 4 million camera-equipped cell phones had been sold by the carrier, and the launch of a new service that allows short videos to be sent from phone-to-phone or PC has pushed sales to around 1 million units per quarter, according to J-Phone.

Success of the service also pushed J-Phone's two biggest domestic competitors, NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, to launch their own services.

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