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.

[1] 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.

[3] 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.

Samsung's SCH-V200 phone equipped with a VGA camera was released in South Korea several months before the J-SH04.

It could not convey an image "at a distance," which some regard as part of the definition of a "camera phone.