Cell phone doubles as home surveillance gear
Singapore telephone company releases a home surveillance camera that lets people view the images via their mobile phones.
The Mobile LiveCam is 0.3-megapixel camera equipped with a SIM card, a built-in microphone and a 512MB memory card for recording video-streaming images, SingTel said in a statement.
In addition, the battery-operated camera is equipped with infrared video capabilities to better capture images in dimly lit spaces and at night.
The surveillance camera operates on a 3G network. To view the images captured, people dial the camera's assigned number using their 3G mobile phone. They can use the numeric keypad on their phone to remotely control the camera, which SingTel said is able to pan, tilt and zoom in.
In addition, the company said, its new product supports features such as image brightness, volume, on-the-fly recording and image inverting.
The service is available to residential customers with an existing SingTel Mobile 3G account, at a monthly subscription fee of about $6 (8.56 Singapore dollars), plus a one-time equipment fee of about $240.
Lynn Tan of ZDNet Asia reported from Singapore.