J-SH04

The J-SH04 was a mobile phone made by Sharp Corporation and released by J-Phone (now SoftBank Mobile). It was only available in Japan, and was released in November 2000. It was Japan's second phone with a built-in, back-facing camera. It has a 1/7 inch format, 110,000 pixel CMOS image sensor and a 256 color display, both manufactured by Sharp. The CMOS sensor used only 20% of the power of Sharp’s similarly sized CCD sensor. The phone weighed 74g, and its dimensions were 127 × 39 × 17 mm. It was succeeded by the J-SH05 flip phone, which was released just one month later. It is also considered to be one of the first phones with polyphonic ringtones.

While the J-SH04 popularized the concept of a camera phone (branded as Sha-Mail) and was the world's first fully integrated camera and telephone over a cellular mobile network, it had a number of predecessors. In December 1997, Kyocera released the VP-110, which was a PCMCIA videophone adapter with an 80,000-pixel CCD camera that swiveled 210° and attached to the DataScope DS-110 and DS-320 mobile phones. Kyocera released the first commercial mobile camera-phone in September 1999, the VP-210 Visual Phone which had a front-facing 110,000-pixel CMOS camera enabling both video calling and sending photos over the air. The VP-210 could send its still images as mail attachments or send video at 2 frames per second over a PHS network. In contrast, the J-SH04's camera on the back of the phone was designed to take photos facing away from the user, which was a more popular way to use digital cameras at the time than video calling and selfie photos. The SH04 was the transformational moment for the camera phone.