Thinking about it now, the way BlackBerry did things for their smartphones would be a tough sell today but was absolutely perfect for the goals of minimizing expensive hardware and expensive mobile data transfer to the end user, but also ensuring that the system couldn't be usefully eavesdropped from the network side.
The handheld connected to a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) that did most of the heavy lifting via an encrypted tunnel. Images were downsampled there for transport!
As I recall that functionality was clever too - it worked properly between the BES and the handheld UI to send the image with resolution appropriate for its use. If you were just going to view it on screen in the web browser, it was downsampled. If you requested to save the image locally to your device, the BES passed it through and delivered the original file.
The web browser did have a local bypass that as I recall was only used when you had to sign into a wifi captive portal
@noiob Handspring had a similar setup with the Blazer browser. I had this absolutely bonkers weird Xircom 802.11b adapter for the Visor series that used it.
The Xircom was HECKING CHONKERONI AND CHEESE as I recall. It required its own built in battery and got warm in use.