The new device, which T-Mobile plans to ship sometime next month, packs a number of hardware and software features for the photo enthusiast, including an 8-megapixel camera, a wide-aperture lens, no shutter lag and a dedicated hardware button that lets users skip the lock screen and go straight from sleep mode to taking pictures. That last feature is a popular option on Windows Phone 7 and Apple is working to add something similar with iOS 5.

Overall, the phone is designed to earn a place in the hearts of smartphone buyers, who increasingly count on their phones to serve as their primary point-and-shoot camera.

“Knowing that the best camera is the one you’ve got with you, we set out to create a new best-in-class smartphone that allows our customers to leave their cameras at home,” T-Mobile Senior VP Andrew Sherrard said in a statement. “Our newest myTouch device takes capturing and sharing memories to a new level by combining high-quality smartphone hardware with features that customers would expect from a top-of-the-line digital camera.”

The device is also capable uploading images directly to Facebook, Picasa and Flickr and of recording 1080p high-definition. The myTouch 4G Slide also comes with several photo programs, including one that takes panoramic photos and another that allows several photos to be taken in a single burst.

On the non-photo side, the phone comes in two colors (black and khaki) and packs a slide-out keyboard, Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), a 1.2 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon chip and a 3.7-inch screen.

T-Mobile has yet to announce pricing or exact availability for the device.

Discussions with developers show that Nokia (NOK) is making some headway in proving its value in a Silicon Valley preoccupied with Steve Jobs and Google (GOOG), but it’s still got a ways to go.

Nokia approached Andy Sheldon, founder and chief executive of San Francisco-based Fizwoz, at a Silicon Valley event in December, after he had showed off his Fizwoz application, a mobile auction application that connects cameraphone users to photo editors who could potentially buy their images. A month earlier, the company had launched a beta version of its application in the Apple App Store.

Mr. Sheldon says Nokia sat down with him and explained its geographical reach, and how it sells more smartphones a day than the competition. Nokia waived its access fees for the Ovi Store and even pointed Fizwoz to freelance developers it could use to develop the application for Nokia.

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Digital Daily covered the Steve Jobs story this week, starting with the all-hands memo in which the Apple (AAPL) founder announced his medical leave and following through with the reactions of both Wall Street and the company’s investors. Then there’s the general response, which has been variously diagnosing Jobs’s health issues and predicting the demise of Apple without him–not without good reason, but quite a departure from the reaction when Bill Gates left Microsoft (MSFT). Digital Daily also noted that even though Palm’s (PALM) stock price made a jump directly after the introduction of the Pre and its new Web OS, the company will need to sell a lot of phones in order to attract a robust community of developers. And let’s not forget the roll call of fallen companies, including two of the latest to fall victim to the econalypse, Nortel (NT) and Circuit City (CC).

Can Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim save the New York Times? MediaMemo had the story of the gray lady’s possible white knight, plus coverage of some recent ideas about how newspapers in general can be rescued from a grim fate. Hint: not by a Facebook event. There are some bright spots for traditional media, though, made possible by the increasingly social Web. Incredible photos are often made available for free and as news is breaking, saving editors from the limitations and high prices they’re accustomed to from established agencies. A perfect example arose this week when U.S. Airways flight 1549 made a spectacular emergency landing on the Hudson. Twitter, a camera phone and an incredible photo almost singlehandedly changed the way people think about citizen journalism–as an aid to, not a replacement for, professional reporting.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, BoomTown moderated the SuperSession panel titled “What Will They Think of Next? Consumer Technology in 2025.” A lot of the discussion involved pretty much the general consensus of what’s on the horizon, but there were some edgier ideas from the panel, which included an interesting cross section of the digital industry. BoomTown interviewed all of the participants on camera afterward about their visions of 2025, and some of the results were pretty funny. Of course, BoomTown had a say about the various degrees of silence and hysteria surrounding Steve Jobs’s health issues, urging people to put things in perspective, and evoking his 2005 commencement speech, in which he advised graduates to “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” BoomTown says: Not this foolish. The passing of the leadership torch at Yahoo (YHOO) took center stage last week, starting with the classy exit of Sue Decker and her memo to the troops. Next up: Yahoo’s official announcement of Carol Bartz as CEO and her first words as its fearless leader: “Yahoooo!” and “Friggin’.” Here’s full coverage of the transition.

Walt Mossberg voiced his strong and sensible opinion about the media circus surrounding Steve Jobs’s leave of absence on Fox Business last week, which is, first and foremost, concern for the man and best wishes for his recovery. On the gadget front, he discusses different options for putting e-books on your cellphone and Web OS, the new operating system that debuted with the Palm Pre. Katie Boehret looked at a couple of Web search tools that deliver better results by paying attention to what results you click on.

More next week. Wait–later this week.

But keeping those types of digital-photo frames up-to-date with new pictures demands more technical skill than many parents and grandparents are likely to have. It requires, for example, rudimentary knowledge of how to configure a home Wi-Fi network or shuttle storage cards between a frame and a digital camera. Still, digital frames are a great way to keep generations in touch with, say, a far-flung child’s latest ballet recital or a football game.

Just in time for the holidays, the wireless carrier T-Mobile is selling a digital-photo frame that makes it easy to set up and to keep fresh. While I found the Cameo excels in its simplicity, it comes with a number of annoying drawbacks and a pricing model that will limit its appeal. It sells for a reasonable $99.99 in T-Mobile stores, but carries a hefty $9.99 monthly fee.

Still, Cameo is an exciting first edition of a product.

First, its strengths. The picture frame is as easy to operate as a cellphone, containing some of the same technical innards of a wireless handset. And each Cameo has a unique phone number, just like a cellphone, that lets anyone who knows the number to “dial” it up — sending messages containing digital photographs instead of voice calls.

Setting up Cameo is as easy as taking it out of a box, screwing a stick into the back to prop up the frame and plugging it into an electrical outlet. The Cameo has a seven-inch color display and one of the more attractive borders I’ve seen on a digital photo frame: imitation black leather with white stitching.

Users themselves can manually load images onto the frame from a PC by connecting it through a USB cable or by inserting a miniature storage card from a digital camera.

Cameo can receive pictures wirelessly two ways. The owner of the frame hands out the Cameo’s phone number to friends and family members, who then send pictures to the frame that were taken with the cameras standard on most modern cellphones. This method uses MMS, or multimedia messaging service, a communications standard normally used to share pictures and other media between cellphones.

Cameo owners also can give out an email address for their picture frames that is based on their Cameo’s phone number, allowing people to email images that they’ve downloaded to their computers from digital cameras.

The first time the frame receives a picture from an email address or phone number, Cameo asks the frame owner to push a button on the back of the frame to place the sender on an approved list. After that, all images from the approved source appear automatically on the frame — a method that at least keeps random people’s photos from popping up in grandma’s living room.

There’s a wonderful unpredictability to how Cameo works. Imagine all of the kids and grandkids in a sprawling family room in different locations being able to send snapshots to each other. This is possible now with photo-sharing sites like Flickr, but those typically require going to a Web site. Images on a Cameo just show up without warning on your kitchen countertop, living room or office desk.

I handed out my Cameo number to some colleagues and was delighted when their cameraphone pictures began trickling into my frame, including a shot of the New York neighborhood in which one of them lives, and an image of another colleague ice skating.

The Cameo’s screen, featuring 720×480 pixels, isn’t the highest-resolution digital photo frame on the market, but the pictures looked fine to me. You can do a slide show for any number of images, chose a fade-out or other transition, change the order of the photos and alter the display speed — holding a single image for up to an hour.

Unfortunately, the frame has a skimpy 64 megabytes of memory, and storage capacity isn’t expandable. There is enough room for only about 200 photos at maximum size. Once it’s full, you have to make room by manually deleting photos.

Another problem is that the frame currently is available only to existing T-Mobile cellular subscribers.

By far, the biggest turnoff is the monthly fee for the cellular service that delivers the pictures to the frame. There’s no limit on how many pictures can be sent to a Cameo under T-Mobile’s cellular plan, but $120 a year is a steep price.

The carrier says it will consider other pricing options in the future. Until it does, it’s going to be tough for most people to buy the Cameo, even for a beloved family member.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com