AT&T has announced the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Camera with a connection data plan. Users will be able to send photos using AT&T HSDPA fast data network to share photos at the same time they “click”!

The camera is also equipped with LTE, 4G, wireless and it is very likely that also this network will become part of the AT&T offer.

With this camera you can also browse the internet but you cannot make phone calls (at least for the time being…).

Now, isn’t this interesting? Today we have most cell phones equipped with a digital camera but the quality of the photos is not as good as that you get out of a proper digital camera.  And we have Memory card with embedded WiFi to let you send the picture you just took with your digital camera to Facebook or any where you like. Clearly this latter solves the problem of having a good quality camera and being able to immediately send your photo but we do not have WiFi connectivity everywhere, whilst we have a much more ubiquitous 3G connectivity.

So this explains this new product! Still, I am curious to see what kind of success it will have, What is most interesting to me is that it is something different from a phone, and yet it is being marketed by a phone company. Whilst I am sure that in the future we will have plenty of objects having an embedded connectivity and using such a connectivity as a way to deliver part of their functionality I see this move of AT&T as a way to affirm that connectivity is not embedded but explicit. You want to send photos, you need connectivity and hence you buy a camera from them.

Would you also buy a doll from AT&T in the future since that doll interact with your kid using connectivity to a server? Or is it something you will buy at a Toy Store with embedded connectivity?

Looks more like a mini tablet, or a smart phone, yet it is a camera!

According to a recent interview by Sunhong Lim, VP Sales and Marketing of Samsung, digital cameras are morphing into communications devices. Already in 2012 most of Samsung cameras will have WiFi connectivity and this will become a standard feature in the coming yeas. The reason, according to Lim, is that customer are looking for a total solution to their picture taking fancy, and that includes manipulating the picture and sharing it immediately.

Clearly, young users are in the habit of sharing their pictures on line and for them it is just natural to be able to do the same thing from the camera itself and as soon as they have shot the picture.

The cloud may be the real enabler for making connected cameras a reality and in the future Telecom Operators might even subsidize cameras similarly to the way they subsidize smartphones, according to Lim.

Really, in just a few years we have seen a potential overlap of cameras and cell phones (notice that some cameras are already embedding a mike so that you can voice annotate your pictures and the move from WiFi connectivity to LTE is not a big one, in perspectives). The real question is if cell phones will kill the digital camera market (by embedding good cameras) or if the two world will coexist.

My personal bet is that most of point and shoot cameras will disappear, replaced by the cell phone, whilst the reflex digital cameras for their superior optical quality (and this requires a bulky set, something you are not going to carry around all times) will flank cell phones and probably might embed a cell phone. Or, alternatively, they will wirelessly connect to a cell phone that creates the bridge to the Web.

I posted several times in the past news about cameras that you can wear and use to film snippets of your life. Most of the time it has been in relation to some research (HP one shot, MS myLifeBits) and the camera used was a sort of prototype.

HD camera for 400$ embedded in a sky mask

Now, I run onto Liquid Image, and let me tell you that I am impressed by the variety of mass market (read affordable) products they have embedding a camera in goggles of various shapes, including some for underwater snorkling and squba diving.

The quality of the movies taken is amazing and you don’t need to do anything. Just wear the goggles as you would for skiing or surfing and there you are. At the end of the day you can upload the movie to your media centre and share it with your friends.

And, of course, it is just a matter of time before you’ll be able to stream your own experience in HD wirelessly, thanks to advanced wireless networks like LTE.

I can easily imagine WiFi blanketing a ski slope to let people broadcast their run to their friends.

What is amazing is the easiness and the low cost! It can really become a new fancy for the new year. And just think about the amount of storage that will be needed to store all those clips. Not to mention the new apps that will spring up to manage those clips…

It is a visual world, and it is going to happen, ’cause we are visual animals.

The future of the biz, according the Verizon CTO Richard Lynch, lies in broadband, the copper biz is fading out. The growth of data transported by 2G systems in Verizon has basically stayed stable in the 2004-2008 period whilst 3G has moved from 0 to 4,000 TB per year and the forecast for LTE is a growth in the range of 2,000,000 TB, that is a 500 times growth and this will happen in the next 5 years. The content streamed is similarly growing, along with the User Generated Content.

In front of this figure a company like Verizon has no option but become a broadband company based on fibre and LTE.

FIOS today provides multi-room DVR, 500 television channels, 120 HD channels, 15,000 movie titles per month, widgets and 50/20 Mbps (down/up) speed. Video subscription grew from 1.6 M 3Q2008 to 2.7 M 3Q2009, and 2.2M bought data connection in 2008 growing to 3.3M in the 3Q2009, most of them happy with 10Mbps (not paying surcharge for higher speed).

Although they have plenty of fibre, Verizon looks at its biz as a wireless one and is committed to LTE, they have created an LTE Innovation center open to industry and is performing an LTE network trial, including streaming video.

Verizon is thinking on moving from proprietary shops to sell their services and devices with their own apps store and customer support to a mall paradigm where customer will find Verizon offer, can buy apps there or somewhere else, get support from Verizon or from the “geek squad”.

Openness is the way to go: it cuts costs and increase the market reach. Additionally it may incentivise Consumer Electronics to use Verizon Networks (and a good step in that direction has been the 700MHz auction).This Openness can also be seen at the level of service creation where Verizon is enabling third parties developing services making use of their data centre to get customer data like position, terminal type… and Verizon gets paid per “dip” (that is for every query related to one of their customers). IMS is seen as a way to control these accesses and maintain value in the network.