Got Camera Phone?

I read this article on 6/22/07 regarding the number of camera phones will exceed 1 Billion in 2007. A staggering number, and 1/3 of the population (roughly 2 billion) by 2011, truely amazing, and a dream come true for potential applications for bar codes on both the consumer side and enterpise side. Omniplanar is frequently asked for our SwiftDecoder algorithms to run on cell phones.  Our code is written entirely in C, which makes porting to WinCE, WinMobile and some other operating systems found on phones easier.  However, many phones are running J2ME or Symbian. 

We have started the process of converting our algorithms to Java (J2SE) for the Document Imaging market, and are proud to say that we have successfully converted a few of the 2D symbologies, with more to come, and the remainder of the symbologies to follow, with the exception of postal codes. 

We have found that the J2SE is slower than the C algorithms, and the J2ME algorithms are then even slower.  With an already lightning fast C decoder, the penalty is not too great to switch, but combine J2ME with a slow microprocessor, and an average consumer may struggle to read some bar codes.

Got Camera Phone?  I personally do not, as I rely heavily on my camera-less Blackberry, but the time has come to upgrade.