Sunday, February 01, 2009

'Smart Phones'??

Today as we are expecting snow during the week I thought it would be fun to take the Blackberry and G1 phone our with me for a wander around our local lanes and paths planning on using the audio recording and camera facilities of the Blackberry.... the immediate problem with the said 'Obama phone' was that I couldn't upload pictures or audio directly to 'the cloud' , the only option was to MMS or email - as a result I carried on saving pictures onto the phone while MMS'ing the audio captures to the G1.
The incoming audio was in .amr format......... which of course a WinPC cannot read! One download of a .amr converter and then taking each of the emailed clips to the converter and saving the results.
While this was going on I was busy trying to upload the picture file onto the pc ( time taken copying the picture files into one folder on the Blackberry to keep the time down (alternative would be to email them directly I guess)....... this caused the poor phone to slow down of course with the egg timer constantly playing!!!The overall result of this is that I finished my walk 2 hours ago and as yet the above image is the closest yet to having any part of my walk uploaded to the net!...... hold on that 2hours and 15 minutes and I finally have some images ......

However I still have to convert the audio files - so this first version of my walk is one with a commentary recorded here at the laptop on my return....... by the way for all of those currently in warmer parts of the world, the grey snow clouds have finally appeared here and the snow flurries have begun....!
And finally at 5pm with the snow clouds gathering the Blackberry sound files have been edited to the photographs taken earlier and here is the result...


I would humbly suggest that these particular smart phones are in some respects a step back from other less illustrious mobiles which thanks to tie in's to blogger or wordpress allow direct photoblogging and indeed in some cases the direct upload of video - both sadly lacking in the smart phones on show here..... I certainly hope that the next generation of smart phones (Nokia obviously pretty well there already I think!) will get this sorted for the dedicated mobloggers!

Apologies for the delay in completing this post....... our phone line went down earlier today meaning that my final upload of the soundwalk is now at 8.52pm and it has begun to snow here in South Wales suggesting a snowy version of the soundwalk could happen very soon!!!
The final part of what turned out to be a long process was the final podcast being processed and posted on the podomatic site.
I believe that sound posts to Utterli along with uploaded photographs would have been a more efficient way of postingt this story 9.53pm end of process....... good night all!

4 comments:

Moturoa said...

Just my luck- I spend a year or so wanting to walk by the canal and as soon as I have been and gone they decide to fill it up again! Murphy's law.

I wonder how the iPhone would cope with such a task.

Here are my holiday snaps

Mr Harrington said...

Hi Allanah,
What a fabulous photoset - it captures the huge range of experiences that you had while on your trip beautifully.... thank you for sharing this.

Unknown said...

A valiant effort good sir- but may I just say how Dr Who (Tom Baker in particular) you're looking in those photos

Mr Harrington said...

Many thanks kind sir....... indeed a compliment :-)

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