will anyone know about “show and tell” communicators?

Attaching a camera to a mobile phone doesn’t seem to create much value. In rank order of occurrence of key Telco 2.0 events, 200 early respondents to the Telco 2.0 survey placed “voice revenue less than 20% of mobile operator total revenue” at “13/never.”

Can you use your mobile to take a photo while talking to a friend and send it to her instantly in the stream of your conversation? In other words, can you do real-time show and tell?

Recently in a bustling T-Mobile retail store, I told an energetic young service representative that I wanted a phone that would let me send a photo to the person I’m talking to. He said that all the phones could do that. I asked him to show me how it’s done. He said the he had never tried it, and asked another representative how to do it. That representative said that the phones can’t do it.

The representative in the Verizon retail store told me that he didn’t know if the phones could do it. He then whipped out his RAZR, dialed a number, and then tried to take a photo. The device produced a message saying that the camera was shut off.

In the Sprint retail store, the first representative said she didn’t know. The second said she wasn’t sure if it was possible. The third said he did it once but he didn’t remember how he did it. A customer overhearing our conversation then told us that yesterday she was making a call about a pie that had arrived damaged and she tried to take a picture of it while on the phone and it didn’t work. Oh, that’s a shame, I said.

To assuage my disappointment, the second representative in the Sprint store then told me that she had sent a text while talking on her mobile phone. I asked her if she sent the text message to the person she was talking to. She told me that, no, she had sent it to someone else.

What’s the problem with showing and telling with a phone? Technically, the problem is that normal voice calls are tightly integrated with the transport infrastructure (“circuit switched” not “VoIP” etc.) Even with mobile phones with messaging capability, Internet access, etc., the communications channel established when a person talks on the phone is a traditional voice channel. Hence placing a photo in the stream of communication isn’t possible.

Applications and networks that can support a show-and-tell mobile communicator are right around the corner. Internet telephony software from everyone can already do this. According to the Telco 2.0 preliminary survey results, in order of occurrence “a leading internet player launches a mobile telephone service” is ranked #1 (it’s already happened: AOL in Germany) and “WiFi capability available in mass-market mobile devices” is ranked #2. So show-and-tell mobile communicators will soon be available.

But will anyone show these devices to you and tell you about them?