A particular cellphone company now has a cell phone that will allow you to send video clips to other phones and PCs. It might be guesstimate but eventually we might be able to send images real time. Do you think it is too personal or will you be happy to to beam your pretty faces across the network no matter how you look?

I believe the cell phone company you mention is Nokia. I think both ways on this issue.

It's an invasion of privacy when it comes to certain places like gyms and such but is very useful to take pictures of stuff like yourself. Also, if there is a particular thing you see and what a spouse's opinion, click the pic and show them

Actually the company is Sprint PCS & Sanyo. Yes this does open the door to sexual predators but can also be used to film crimes in progress to use as evidence. Like everything its a tool that can be used both ways. I think it would make the world a nicer place since everyone would have to look somewhat decent to make a phone call and therefore nicer the whole day. You would be able to film events and share it with other parties instantly.

(scoll to the bottom to "news" for the article.)

It's just plain unnecessary. It's a gimmick designed to squeeze money out of dazzled, gullable people, with too much money.

I can see how this could easily become an invasion of privacy issue. Cell phones have infiltrated our society. As technology advances, the quality of video will continue to increase, much like that of the plain picture phones. As this technology advances, copyright issues might come into play. A person, for example, could go to a movie, videotape it, and then send it off to the internet to be download by anyone at a terminal. Have worked security for a music theatre, we saw this problem beginning last summer. In instances where the cameras were not allowed, camera phones became a problem. The artist's right to his or her's own personal image was violated. I personally, am for the advancement of technology. This may cause cell phones to be banned at various events, which would be more than fine with me.

Interesting - this is one of the few technological areas where the USA is 6-12 months behind the times.

My own cellphone is tri-band (so works on US networks as well as European ones, and can use GPRS to send and receive multimedia and use WAP internet sites), so I could take holidays snaps at Niagara last March and send them back to my friends at home right away for the price of a postcard. (The Nokia 7210, which I have, had been available here for about 9 months, but had only just been launched there, and the plug-in cameras were not yet available, at least not in Boston.)

Real-time video phones have been available in Europe for at least that long already (the "3G" technology was launched commercially here in the UK about four or five months ago, and we lagged Scandinavia by some time) and early adopters found that the video quality was poor, and depended very much on the local signal strength - from the link I've posted, you can see that the full video service still has quite limited video coverage, mostly in the biggest conurbations and following the motorway network. The handsets themselves worked fine, but the network connection was the weak point.

The first main 3G phone brand - imaginatively named "3" (See here for examples)- advertises itself with people in one situation seeing something incongruous. A woman wrapped up for winter chats to friends in bikinis on a park bench in England about how much fun they are having at the beach. A man in a business meeting plays with his baby. A man working late at the office is shown a new pair of shoes by his girlfriend, who tell him that they are all she is wearing so he dashes off home. The payoff is that this can now happen for real using the new 3G phones.

A whole number of jokey and not-so-jokey new services are now available, where one could download a clip of commuters milling aroujnd a busy railway station, or a slow-moving traffic jam, and so on, so people could send the clips to their boss, client or wife to excuse their absence, rather than have to be truthful and say that they were being interviewed for another job, staying in bed, had forgotten the appointment, or were having an affair.

They still haven't really taken off here yet, although hansdset sales are still growing.

Like mobile phones (that's the British term for cellular phones - it's often abbreviated to "mobile" or even "moby") themselves, the new technology happens first, then society changes to adapt to their use. Text messaging wasn't seen as a big techological leap at first, but it has become so ubiquitous it has even begun to change the language. Gr8 4 U + me. (I jest).

Sure, the video technology has copyright implications, and the film distributors have changed their timetables to try to keep up already. Most of the really big films now get released on DVD within months of theatrical showings. Think back to the VHS age, and think of a single blockbuster where the video came out in the same calendar year as the film version.

I've also read that, to help prevent copyright theft, and cut down on the annoying twerps who think it's okay to phone their mates in the middle of a movie and say "Yeah, it's all right, but it's not as good as Scream" (an experience I had in the middle of watching the re-release of The Exorcist), cinema owners are experimenting with technology that blocks the signal inside the theatre while the main feature is running. Since it is linked to the film, there are no serious safety issues (and none that weren't present in the days before mobiles).