Moblogging with a camera phone

I have been playing with some mobile tools in my kitchen and living room (the mobile weekend of a family man, I know). The camera phone that I am mostly using, Nokia N95 8GB, just got a new firmware, V 31.0.015, which brought along some nice additional or enhanced features. These include better integration to online photo sharing services. I am using Flickr, and now it is just one click away to share a photo through the default Internet service provider. Also, I noticed that the phone screen automatically tilts to vertical/horisontal (this sensor tech might have been in the previous firmware, too, I am not sure). In the background I am running Location Tagger, which captures the GPS coordinates into the photos’ metadata in a format Flickr can also read. You need to be close to a window for this to work indoors, of course. The app can cache the location data, though, which is handy. I have also Fring now running in the background, which is a mobile instant messenger program that is able to tap into Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk and Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and SIP Internet phone services, to start with. The downside now is that there is always something “interesting” going on in the damned device, so I might turn this off at some point. But the always-connected, automatically location tagging camera is something that I’d like to see in my SLR/main system, too, to look into the future.

Author: frans

Professor of Information Studies and Interactive Media, esp. Digital Culture and Game Studies in the Tampere University, Finland. Occasional photographer and gardener. View all posts by frans