There’s a post at picturephoning about a Symbian app that allows for remote commands to request an image from the handset. One possible app is finding your phone if you’re lost, but there are lots of others. The page for the app mentions using it to check the weather at a weekend cottage or checking up on the kids. Most people can’t imagine leaving their cell somewhere just so they can get pictures from it. Not yet at least. But Nokia has actually been looking in this direction for a while, and has out a product specifically aimed at these kinds of apps. It’s still a very pricey product unless you have some special needs. But these kinds of things have a way of coming down over time. And I could see many parents easily forking over a few hundred plus the price of an extra SIM attached to their account in order to have a video baby monitor they can access from anywhere.

They also provide a great opportunity to spy. Some people have been up in arms about camera phones and how they can be used to invade privacy. They’ve called for the banning of the phones in some areas, and I’ve heard that some corporations are considering banning the devices from their facilities. Imagine how much more agitated a phone like this will make those people. It also has great use for corporate espionage. One needs just place the camera in the right place and they can retreive their images from anywhere. The intruder doesn’t have to be within range of their bug, they don’t have to hook into existing facility resouces, and the RF signature is nothing special (this is something that’s commonly used to detect a listening device, the use of non-standard frequencies). Use the phone with a prepaid SIM, and it makes for a great bugging device.