Marcel Hilzinger

Sony camera with Linux and WiFi integrated.

At the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show Sony presented the new camera from its Cyber-shot product line. The DSC-G3 comes with a Zeiss lens with 4x zoom, a large 3.5" touch display and 4 GBytes of internal memory. Most interesting is the camera's software that includes, among other things, face and scene recognition, based on Busybox and Kernel 2.6.11 for the Access Linux Platform (ALP). The kernel code makefile reveals further:

VERSION = 2

PATCHLEVEL = 6

SUBLEVEL = 11

EXTRAVERSION := $(EXTRAVERSION)-alp

NAME=Woozy Beaver

ALP is successor to the Palm OS, for which there have been few devices produced up to now, but notably the Emblaze Edelweiss mobile phone.

The camera's additional WLAN module and integrated browser allow photos to go directly on the web or to be sent over e-mail, via a deal in the U.S. with AT&T. Unlike competitor products from Nikon or Kodak that have their own Wi-Fi functions, the Sony camera works with AT&T hotspots so that external access point software isn't necessary. The Sony webpage has a general overview of the camera's features.

Sony DSC G3 Interface

Source code for the kernel, Busybox and other components are available for free download here. The DSC-G3 costs about $500 in the U.S.