No longer just a novelty, camera cell phones are officially mainstream products. According to a recent report from market-research firm Strategy Analytics, these mobiles represented 38 percent of total handset sales last year, up from 16 percent in 2003. And now that Nextel is offering camera phones, a wide variety of models are available. In case you're thinking of going the picture-phone route, here's what you need to know about sending images, plus the skinny on each of the major carriers' service offerings and fees.

MMS basics
If you're considering chucking your standard film or digital camera in favor of a picture phone, think again. The image quality still doesn't match up with what you'd get from even a low-level digital camera, as most camera phones are still only VGA quality (0.3 megapixels). You won't want to print these shots, but they may be suitable for display on Web sites. But with image quality improving, printing your camera phone images is a more attractive option than it was a year ago. It's relatively easy to find handsets that support at least 1-megapixel photos, and Sprint PCS recently upped the ante further with the Samsung MM-A800, the first 2-megapixel camera sold in the United States.

Most importantly, make sure your friends can see the pictures you send. A step above text messaging, Multimedia Messaging Service is quickly becoming the most popular way to share images with friends and family. Most camera phones use the JPEG format, and along with pictures, multimedia messages can include sound and text files. However, you can send such messages only if the recipient has an MMS-capable mobile and uses the same carrier. Cross-carrier MMS support is finally becoming a reality--Cingular and Verizon recently announced that its customers can share camera phone pictures between their networks--but it still isn't an industry-wide feature. If sending to another phone is an issue, you can also zap pictures directly to an e-mail address, and recipients will either get the image embedded in the body of the message, as an attachment, or as a link to view it at a Web site.

Before you start snapping away, keep in mind that the majority of camera phones don't include a large amount of dedicated storage on the handsets themselves. Though some have a significant amount of space (the Samsung SGH-P777 has 100MB) or offer expandable memory slots, a few megabytes is the norm. Although high-resolution pictures taken with camera phones are typically small files, you'll eventually want to transfer some pictures off your handset. All the major carriers offer online storage facilities, but as with the MMS features described above, you'll need to pay a fee to the carrier (we detail exact fees and services in the proceeding pages). Alternatively, carriers will start providing a link to an online printing service, but that will cost you as well.

If you'd rather not pay for this privilege, you'll either have to purchase data cables from third-party vendors such as Mobile Action and FutureDial to transfer your pictures to a computer or go through the tedious (and potentially costly) method of e-mailing your files. As an alternative, some phones, such as the Sony Ericsson S710a, let you transfer pictures to a PC or PDA wirelessly via either Bluetooth or an infrared port. Also, with megapixel cameras becoming more common, you should be able to find phones that support removable flash storage media, such as a CompactFlash or MultiMediaCard, which provide the smoothest transfer of files between your phone and a PC. But take care, as not all carriers allow you to transfer photos in this manner, thus forcing you to use--and pay for--their picture service. Verizon's Motorola V710 is a great example.