It’s hard for mobile handset makers to keep anything secret nowadays, thanks to the profusion of websites and blogs eagerly reporting on spy shots and tech specs for upcoming handsets. Meanwhile, there are other, unwitting ways news of a brand new handset can leak out into the public domain.For example, the Cell Addict Blog has come across this photo on Flickr that, according to its Additional Information was taken with a Nokia E71. Click through to the More Properties page, and you see a bunch of technical data on the photo’s aperture, focal length and so on.Anyway, it proves that the E71 exists (although it’s been rumoured online for some time). We’ll have to wait and see what the handset itself is like when Nokia officially unveils it.
Tag Archive for 'Flickr'
While Flickr users are getting their knickers in a twist over its launch of videos, mobile backup firm Mobyko has snuck up with its own multimedia sharing service. It lets people upload photos and videos direct from their phones to Mobyko’s gallery, which can then be shared with mates online.
It even lets you store texts, which Mobyko says is ideal if you need to keep an important text from a business associate. Does that ever happen in the real world? I assume there’s also a feature that stops your important texts being shared with the world alongside your photos and videos, mind. You can organise all this stuff into albums, and add descriptions to individual photos and videos.”We wanted to give every mobile user the tools to ensure that they would never again lose a mobile moment,” says Mobyko CEO Julian Saunders.
It’s a logical extension to the company’s existing contacts backup service, but it remains to be seen whether it’ll attract new users, given the competition from individual sites like Flickr and YouTube, established mobile startups like ShoZu, and handset apps like Nokia’s Lifeblog.
I know what you’re thinking: isn’t Flickr the Flickr of mobile photography? After all, there are numerous ways to get your camphone snaps onto Yahoo’s photo-sharing site. However, that hasn’t stopped US firm Mobicious from launching its own mobile-centric service, called SnapMyLife.
The idea: you take a shot on your phone, and immediately send it to SnapMyLife using MMS or email, where it’s published for the world to see. There’s also some good social networking features, allowing you to invite friends from your phone, and get alerts when they publish new pics. Oh, and there’s no filth involved, since the company is using filters to identify and remove risque snaps. CEO George Grey is certainly bullish:
“Internet-based social networks and photo-sharing sites have recently introduced mobile uploading features, but have only scratched the surface. Many of SnapMyLife’s early users prefer to use the mobile-focused SnapMyLife site over services that provide their ‘full-experience’ on desktop interfaces.”
Although it launched today, the site’s had more than 90 days of pre-launch testing, and claims to have signed up more than 1,000 people a day, attracting over 500,000 unique visitors last month alone. Oh, and it’s apparently one of the ten most popular social networking web apps on the iPhone already. It’s well worth a look.
There’s not a dry eye in the house over at Nokia Beta Labs. Their little media uploading app, Share Online, is all grown up and ready to make its fortune in the real world.
In the Beta Labs blog, Tommi Vilkamo announced that Share Online will be becoming a fully fledged, non-beta application available from Nokia’s Sharing and Blogging microsite.
Share Onlne, as previously covered by Pocket Picks, is an automated media uploader that lets you send your photos and movies to Flickr and Vox. The newly released v3.0 also supports Ovi.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to post about Nokia Beta Labs without using the word ‘boffins’ in the opening sentence.
Nokia Location Tagger is a new release from the Beta Labs - a simple add-on to ’selected’ Nokia phones running S60 3rd Edition that allows you to geotag photos with GPS data.
Geotagging in this context just means finding the GPS coordinates for your location when you take a photo, and then recording those coordinates in the EXIF data associated with that photo. EXIF data is readable by a wide variety of software as well as photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa. These apps can use geotag data to organise your photos by location or display them using Google Maps, etc.
As apps go it is pretty underwhelming (you either need geotagging or you don’t, really) but there is an interesting paragraph in this blog post, announcing the app, which suggests that geotagging is to become a standard part of all future Nokia cameraphones. Is this part of a wider geolocation strategy by the wily Finns? Certainly, their Lifeblog service could make good use of it…
The latest installment of the Pocket Picks iPhone review concerns the two most high-profile Web 2.0 apps on the handset: YouTube and Google Maps. They’re both the result of Apple palling up with Google, despite the latter having its own mobile ambitions with the Android platform.
YouTube first, then. It lets you browse the popular video-sharing site by Featured vids, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Recent, and using a Search function. In the case of Most Viewed, you can narrow it down to today, this week, or all-time depending on your preference. On the iPhone, you can see how YouTube is a good dip-in dip-out experience, in that you fire up the app, watch a few videos to kill time, then duck out again.
Choosing a video switches iPhone into widescreen mode, and the quality is pretty good (obviously, you’ll want to be using the iPhone’s wi-fi connection rather than EDGE). Once watched, you can bookmark them, share (this sends an email with the link in), and click straight through to a bunch of related vids. The only disappointment is there’s no way to read or post comments, or even ratings.
Continue reading ‘UK iPhone Review Part 5: YouTube and Google Maps’
If your Windows Mobile smartphone’s full of pictures, videos and music tracks, what are you going to do with them? How about turn them into your own short film complete with soundtrack, special effects and narration.
TrackAxMobile is the smartphone version of a PC program letting you take your content, put it together into a ‘video mix’ including videos, photos, text, effects, soundtrack and narration, even credits, which you can then share via YouTube, Flickr and other, similar sites. Or, if you’d prefer you can save it and email or MMS the video to your mates.
It’s incredibly easy to use and with the minimum of practice you could creating your own mobile masterpieces in a matter of minutes.
If it sounds interesting, there’s a seven-day evaluation version you can try from trackAx, or you can buy it for around £15.
Bango, which specialises in mobile payment provision, has launched a one-touch access to mobile content from users’ social networking sites, or blogs.
The “Get On My Mobile” Bango Button is designed so anyone using a social website, media sharing site, forum or blog can make their content available to mobile phone users with one click.
The Bango service will automatically resize images for download to mobile phones, and can configure sites to fit on mobile screens - so you don’t have to.
It’s been designed for sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, Blogger, Orkut and WordPress. It’s already been through Beta testing and is now being rolled out to the public.
To create their own ‘Get On My Mobile’ button, users simply have to insert a code generated by Bango next to the content they want to share from their site. When users click on the button, they will get a URL which they enter into their mobile’s browser. If you want to make money, you can charge for downloading this content.
Yahoo! has released version 2.0 of its Yahoo! Go app for Symbian and Windows Mobile devices.
Although still considered by many to be ‘that other search engine’, Yahoo! has been steadily adding to its portfolio of interesting web apps and Yahoo! Go offers several ‘widgets’ that act as mini portals to your Flickr photos, news & sports, Yahoo! email (is that exclamation point annoying you as well?) and web search functions.
You can also upload photos to Flickr directly from your phone’s memory and a well thought out map widget offers traffic reports, GPS integration and route planning as well as localized search functions (e.g. ‘find the nearest pub to my current location’)
The News widget offers a variety of sources is also a fairly capable RSS reader if you want to add your own.
How useful you find the mail widget will depend greatly on how committed you are to non-Yahoo! email services, but if you are a heavy Flickr user then widget that alone would make this a worthwhile download.
Zumobi is a new mobile browsing app that offers an unusual interface and uses cached data to speed up online usage and give the option of offline browsing as well.
Rather than a traditional browser, Zumobi offers a set of sixteen ‘Tiles’, each containing a link to some specially-formatted web content. The user can ‘zoom in’ on a set of four tiles, then zoom further to bring up the relevant page.
There is a Flash demo here that should give a flavour of what that it looks like in practice.
Zumobi’s servers cache the data for your preselected tiles and the mobile app caches it onto your phone so you should be able to keep up to date even if you are in a blackspot or on board a plane.
It all sounds like good fun, but any walled-garden approach to the web lives or dies on its range of content and although Zumobi claim partnerships with big players like Flickr and Amazon, the ability to add your own content could prove crucial to this service taking off.
Targeted advertising is also presented as a feature and while it is admittedly better than spam it’s hard to picture many people walking around thinking “Ooh, do you know what? I could just go for some targeted advertising right about now.”
The beta version launches on the 14th of December and you can sign up here.
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