No more silent mode when snapping keitai pictures...?

A friend of mine told me that mobile phones in Japan don't have a silent mode when you take a picture anymore because of the problem with upskirt photos. That means when you take a picture your phone will play a jingle and there's no way to turn it off. I remember trying to search for a way to turn mine off a long time ago when I first got it but I never found that option. I thought I was just looking in the wrong area.

Has anyone else ever heard of this? It sounds like an urban legend to me....but...like I said I can't find a way to turn my jingle off...heh.

 

Indeed it is true, basically the phone must make a sound that can be heard so that dirty old men can't use them in the train to take upskirt shots.

 

It does make sense. If it didn't make a sound people could just pretend to be doing something else (reading mails) while taking pictures. On the other hand it's no problem to find a stand alone digital camera that you can hide in your palm. Would be harder to find an excuse if you got caught though.

 

Japanese phones have made a sound when using the camera since the first phone cameras came out years ago. Most make a simulated camera shutter sound like a digital camera. However if you use the video camera on a Japanese phone that WON'T make any noise at all until you save the video :nod:

Yakumo

 

Its weird isn't it. My first K750 was turned the shutter noise off when in silent - it doesn't now. Its annoying- not that Im taking upskirts, but I don't want people to know im taking a picture of something stupid..!

 

Did any software update?

My K750 makes the shutter sound (very loud) even on silent mode, ever since i bought it. Software updates kept that way.

There's a way to fix this, using a mod software, but i never bothered to do so.

 

Sounds Easily fixable if you just remove the Shutter Sound off the phone, and sense most of the phones in Japan seem to be smart phones it wouldnt be so hard to just remove the sound its trying to play.

..then again I cant imagine myself actually being low enough to sneak a pic of some girls under there skirts.

 

Sony-Ericsson phones have it as well (they are very popular in Europe).

I found it annoying at several ocassions before. Example is when I want to take a picture of the greenboard at school if I don't have time enough anymore to copy the notes on it. I sit in the middle row of the classroom and everyone turns around when the sound goes off :banghead:

 

A lot of phones won't make the sound if you change the profile to "silent" or "meeting" I know that used to work on my old NEC phone and my Sony Ericsson, not that I used it for such devious means mind. Although I was reading Akihabara News today and they had a HD camcorder that was smaller than a packet of cigs. Wouldn't take much to strip the casing and fit it inside a large boot, and just walk around all day positioning your foot somewhere it shouldn't be.

 

Some phones have an "engineering mode" that lets you disable things like camera shutter sound. Other phones, you just need to gain access to the write protected system memory to blank out the audio file (And those pre-loaded provider crap too if you want). On Blackberry's, you can use a special app loader to bootup the camera instead of letting the OS do it. The loader will dial down the volume via code and boot the camera. To the OS, it assumes everything is part of the loader so it doesn't know the camera was started, or that the volume was modified.

 

i don't really know about erikssons or japanese phones or whatnot, but i've had my share of experience with nokia's and spesifically their firmwares.
in Nokia's it is a separate setting in camera options to use or not to use the sound for it. it is also disabled on the "silent" mode where pretty much all voice alerts are disabled. This pretty much applies to the smarthones tho, the older camera phones with crappy VGA cameras and something quite different than s60 software didn't really have proper options for anything to begin with so not too many of them even had camera options

 

US is trying to make that a law here, too, but honestly, it's stupid. I'm sure there are ways around it, too. Got any SDKs for phones? Then that's all you need for most of them...

If a camera phone should make a noise when it takes a picture or record video, then any CCTV camera should make a noise when it's recording because I want to know who's watching me, too.

 

maddhatter256,

Did you not know I'am with big brother and the all seen eye?:lol:

 

most phones it's easy to enter debug mode and it'll disable it

 

You don't actually need to get down very low. It's possible to take shots even while sitting on train seats. ;-)



I joke, I joke!

 

Then the girls should just not wear those types of clothing!

 

I'm curious, what kind of clothes do they wear? :110:

 

chikans do kill teh speaker.

 

How's that working out for you? :fresh:

 

lol.. i have anyway just one phone, that one from my company, and there is no cam at all:nod:

but that thought came up in my mind.