Moblogging News

Technology is moving forwards quickly. Every day I read about phones with improved image quality and we should see 3 Mega Pixel Phones by the end of the year. But a much needed feature has been developed by a Korean firm.

Camera Phone Zone reports that Hysonic has managed to design an actuator that would allow camera phones to gain auto focus functions. It is small at 12.8 mm which is also great as we dont want big things in our small phones.

Good stuff

Reiters Camera Phone Report reports that T-Mobile are working in collaboration with Kodak to provide services to mobile users.

I recently wrote about Bonusprint's movement into the online photo market. Picture printers have found that their market is being swallowed up by the advent of camera phones and are obviously reacting accordingly. Kodak's offering includes the ability to store an unlimited number of photos online and the ability to share them to individuals or groups. The main aim here is to make it as easy as possible to order prints of your online pictures in the same way that Bonusprint are.

I used an Epson R800 printer at the weekend to print out a few pictures. I had the best paper and the best settings enabled. I was extremely impressed with the result. It wasn’t exactly a quick process but this marks some major problems coming towards the printer providers like Kodak. Not only are camera phones looking like a very viable alternative to digital cameras but the printing technologies available to home and office users are becoming comparable to that of a photo lab.

Scotsman.com have reported on the dangers of moblogging for children. It is thought that -bleep- could use the services to 'groom' young children.

"Rachel O’Connell, head of the UK’s new National Internet Safety Information Centre, which was launched today, said many were simply not aware of the risks.

She said children had to be careful when placing photographs or personal information about themselves and their daily routine on the web.
-bleep- could use this to decide who they are going to target for online grooming, she warned. "

This is obviously an important message - Moblogging services are another form of social networking and with this comes the unfortunate danger of -bleep- activity. It would be a good idea to see all of the moblogging services place warnings during the account registration process as there are young users actively creating blogs all the time. Also it goes without saying, any suggestive pictures recieved by moderators of moblogging sites should be reported to the relevant services.

The BBC have also reported on this recently.

The 3G portal Nokia have announced that they are shipping their new smartphone to Europe. The 7710 has a widescreen and is packed full of multimedia features. It comes with a megapixel camera, music player, video functions, visual radio, anti-virus, bluetooth, upto 1gb of MMC memory and finally a piece of moblogging software. Infosyncworld offers a good review of the phone.

The moblogging software that is availble on the phone is designed to make it easy to publish photos and text to the web. Nokia is obviously keen to capitalise on blogging. Their 7610 ships with an application called 'life blog' which creates a scrap book of photos and text messages. The phone will offer the ability to edit various aspects of taken photos as well as being able to annotate them.

I like the fact that handset makers are working towards moblogging and I would hope that they would enable the functionality to be compatible with other 3rd party moblog providers and not just their own service (wishful thinking no doubt).