This is a guest post by Keith Palmer. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
If you want to use your camera phone as a web camera, I assume that you are advanced enough to follow below instructions.
Webcams themselves can be expensive, at least for a high quality one, and wireless webcams can be even more expensive (not to mention rare). Most of us already own several cameras and don’t really want to invest more for a webcam. If you have a cameraphone running WindowsMobile 6.x, Symbian, or Java (I’ve used a new Nokia c6), as well as a Bluetooth enabled computer or laptop, and you can use some nifty software to turn your phone into a wireless webcam.
You can download the PC software at sourceforge, and the phone software here. Install both pieces of software on their respective hardware, and then pair your phone with your computer over the Bluetooth connection. You will need to make sure that both are set to be publically visible, and that you know the password for both Bluetooth connections (if applicable).
Running the actual software and connecting it to your phone is pretty easy. Run the SmartCam software on both your computer and your phone. On the computer side, go to the Settings dialogue under the File menu, and then choose Bluetooth as the method of connection. On the cell phone, simply choose the computer from the list of visible devices (do make sure that your computer is visible as a Bluetooth device).
Assuming that everything above has been done properly, you should now see your phone as a webcam and be able to use it with video chat applications, as well as record and save video streams from it. This is really great because having the wireless feature makes it a lot more versatile than traditional webcams, and having the camera in a small, lightweight phone makes it easy to move around, and set up in different locations. Nowadays, more and more phones have video chat features built-in, but not all of them do, and so this is a great way to get around that limitation. Even though phone camera quality isn’t that great, webcams generally aren’t high quality, and don’t need to be, because of the limitations of most people’s bandwidth. The one thing about this kind of setup that might limit the quality is the Bluetooth connection, as it is not made for streaming large amounts of data. However this is a great way to add an extra feature to your phone, and it does work pretty well.
Keith Palmer is a student at technology science class. He writes tutorials and reviews for warious magazines and websites. At this point he writes tutorials for mobicity