Cell phone with a camera, or camera with a phone?

John Riddell's Data Recovery Blog poses this curious question, how do you view your mobile device and how to you maintain it?

"With the increasing popularity of built in cameras with our cell phones today, it’s no longer a question as to whether you’ll use it at all but how often you’ll use it. It seems as though there is as much emphasis on the cameras in the phones today as there is memory, battery length and amount of apps we can store. I recently saw a TV commercial for a phone with a camera and the only thing they talked about were the features of the camera, nothing else."

That being said, how are you processing video/image evidence retrieved from mobile devices? Do you have the ability to safely acquire the images? Do you use your own iTunes account? With the cost of "forensic" software being relatively high, folks are "just doing what they can" to get images from phones and tablets. Some are even e-mailing images off the evidence to their own e-mail account.

Whatever you are doing, have a sound policy / practice document … and follow it.