Nokia's little brother will be watching you -- eventually

NEVER MIND Big Brother, Nokia has introduced your Little Brother, a GSM based remote camera it calls the Observation Camera.

Mysteriously, however, the camera won't ship until Q2 of 2003, making us wonder why it's ramping up the hype six months ahead of time.

Obviously invented by Nokia engineers who were worried about thieves breaking into their holiday homes, Nokia has decided to productise the concept and come up with a standalone camera which can remotely provide a number of security related applications.

For example, you can call the camera up via a standard GSM voice call (Europe, Africa & Asia only) and listen to hear what is going on in the vicinity. More realistically you can send it an SMS (text) message and it will take a snapshot which can then be sent back as an MMS (fototext) message.

More conventionally the device possesses a motion detection device which send a back a picture via an email, for example, via GPRS (packet data).

For those worried about fires rather than burglars, the Observation Camera contains a thermometer so that when things 'hot up', it sends an image.

Nokia maintains that the camera can provide high resolution graphics images. Given all of its capabilities, it will make one heck of an electronic baby sitter. µ