Digital Camera Reviews

Get More From Your Camera Phone

It seems that in recent times, it's no longer the case that the main use of a mobile phone is to make phone calls. The cost of manufacturing miniature components has fallen dramatically, allowing us access to a host of multimedia applications on the latest mobile phones. We can now take pictures, listen to music, watch and make videos clips, access the Internet, make notes and even make phone calls on our mobile phones!

Not so long ago, people commuting to work may have taken with them a mobile phone, maybe a personal organiser and some form of music player to help alleviate the boredom of the journey. Some people in certain occupations like Estate Agents may have even taken a compact digital camera for snaps. Now people can just take their latest camera mobile phone with them, which provides them with access to movies, games, music, online shops, photos, voice recordings and so much more besides. The amalgamation of these gadgets and features into one compact, affordable device is really an amazing feat of engineering technology.

Great though it is to have access to these fun features, a lot of space (or memory) is required to be able to store all the information. Most mobile phones off the shelf come with a certain amount of built-in memory (or internal memory), the amount of which varies from phone to phone, but generally speaking built-in memory is kept to a minimum. This is because manufacturers realised the build cost of mobile phones could be massively reduced by building just enough memory into each phone so that it is usable, i.e. there is just enough internal memory in a phone so that it may function as a phone, plus allowing for a few music tracks and photos to be stored. So if you want to get a bit more out of your mobile it's essential to substantially increase its memory.

Increasing the memory is easy, all it involves is buying a suitable memory card and inserting it in the slot somewhere on your camera phone, it really is that simple. Memory cards are available in various capacity which are measured in Mb i.e. 128Mb, 256Mb, 512mb etc, the bigger the Mb capacity, the more pictures you can store. Recently memory cards have moved up to even bigger sizes to cope with the memory requirements of many multimedia devices, measured in Gb i.e. 1Gb, 2Gb etc, 1Gb equals 1000Mb so now you can work that out!

The exact amount of data you can store on a certain size memory card is difficult to work out because of the various formats of data being stored for music, images, data etc. Generally speaking photos, video clips and MP3 music files use up large amount of memory space, e.g. an average pop song on MP3 will use approx 4-5Mb of memory and video will use much more.