// Pocket Picks //

In the past, if you had a blog and wanted to post to it from your mobile, you had to use the clunky method of sending your text and pictures in a picture message or email. It worked, but it was a bit fiddly, and the results didn’t always look great when published – for example endless posts headlined ‘YOU HAVE RECEIVED A NEW MESSAGE…’ if you used MMS.
The logical answer is a moblogging application that sits on your phone, allowing you to tap in text and upload photos taken with your phone’s camera.

And whaddya know, last week Typepad – one of the large professional blogging sites – released one into the wild for smartphones running the Palm OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems.

Pocket Picks is produced using the rival WordPress platform, but otherwise I’m a heavy Typepad user, so downloaded it straight away to see if it was any good.

Installation was quick and pain-free using the Over-The-Air (OTA) option on my Nokia N70. You just go to the WAP address get.typepad.com, select your phone model and download the application. There’s also an option to download the software to your computer and transfer it onto your handset from there.

Once installed, the app fired up first time and asked me for my Typepad login details, before connecting to the server to download details of my blogs. Once that’s done, they appear as a list every time you start the application, although you can choose which of your blogs you want to manage on the mobile.

For each blog, pressing the Options soft-key brings up the choice to write a New Post. You can then either take a snap using your camera, or use one of the ones already stored on your handset. Give the post a title, write your body text, and assign it a category (the app downloads all your existing categories from each blog).

I’m impressed. The application is quick and slick. The main thing is that it didn’t feel fiddly: you can write posts quickly, although obviously on the N70 not as quickly as on a full QWERTY keyboard.

There are a few bugs though. I found that unless you open up a blog before creating a new post, the categories are all from the first blog in your list, which is a pain. And a couple of times the application crashed when trying to take a pic directly from my camera, although my N70’s memory was chock-full at the time, so that could be the reason.
One thing I was worried about was data charges. A typical N70 photo is around 420-450kB in size, so if you moblog regularly, the price you’re paying for uploading all this data could be huge if you’re on the wrong tariff. You can choose to resize photos to 640-pixels though, which cuts them down to around 100kB.

Typepad Mobile is, bugs aside, a great application if you’re a Typepad user with a hankering for blogging on the go. It’s not the finished article, but in terms of easy and relatively painless moblogging, it’s a great start.

USEFUL LINKS
Official Typepad Mobile site
Jeff Clavier’s Software Only blog reviews Typepad Mobile
Mobilecrunch blog reviews Typepad Mobile