The post below was to test to see how well ShoZu uploads photos to my Wordpress. As you can see, it doesn’t do it very well. It also seems to not upload the photo to my website, but to the ShoZu servers and links to it. Blasphemy! I am going to go uninstall it.
I just signed up for Twitter, out of curiosity. After playing around with it for about an hour, I STILL can’t figure out what it’s for and why this seems to be such a “phenomenon”. Can anyone explain this to me? (either the purpose of the website or how it became a “phenomenon”)
EDIT: Bless this guy.
Ever since I’ve had my new Nokia 7373, I’ve been exploring options about what to do with it. I’m a tech girl, but have never been a gadget person, so exploring the limits of what my phone can do is wandering into foreign territory. Since it has a large screen (320×240px resolution), internet connectivity (albeit no UMTS or Wi-fi) and Java/Flashlite, I figured to see where it was I could take it. Here are my results.
Social Networking:
Socialight is a location aware application which allows you to place virtual “sticky notes” anywhere and to retrieve them and those placed by others based on your proximity to them. It’s a great application for random discovery, and if you’d like more tailored results, say, “sushi”, there are channels which allow you to view subject-specific location based information. Translation: Run a search for “sushi” after inputting your current location and you’ll get all tagged Sushi joints in about a 1 mile radius. Here is my profile page if you’d like to see what I’ve tagged around the city here in Hamburg. Socialight’s WAP site/application works great, hopefully they’ll come out with a Java application for Nokia s40 (3rd ed.) devices as well (currently, a s60 application is being developed).
Internet Browsing:
Opera Mini 4.0 Beta is the most impressive mobile browsing offering I have ever seen, period. It displays web pages as they are (and not as your mobile browser wants them to look), cuts down on data transfer, includes a mouse pointer, and supports CSS. It has all sorts of nifty features and costs 100% less than an iPhone. Ooh la la.
Email:
Gmail Mobile: Nokia s40’s email application is a piece of doodoo. Over-simplified, cumbersome, and it doesn’t work so well in terms of connectivity. It was a pain to set up and a pain to use. As a gmail user, I was thrilled to learn that google came out with a Gmail mobile application (application, not site. It’s Java based), which is quick, cuts down on data transfer, functions like you’d expect your browser based online Gmail to, and of course – is entirely synchronized with your email account. It works great and I couldn’t be happier.
Things I need to know:
Yahoo! Go: One of the things I’ve always used any cellphone I’ve had for, was to read the news and check up on the weather forecast. Even with my old brick-of-a-cellphone, the Nokia 7120. Yahoo! Go just came out with a version that supports my Nokia 7373, to say I was impressed with it would be a severe understatement. The application, besides having a great UI, taps into my Flickr account, my local weather and world headlines from CNN.com. Unfortunately, I found the application to be a bandwidth sucker and a little slow. Hopefully these will be fixed and optimized in the near future.
The world around me:
Google Maps mobile works flawlessly on my phone. I still may get lost, but at least I’ll have.. erm, google maps on my phone for coolness factor. Ah, yes.
The Japanese Factor:
Kaywa Reader allows supported handsets to read QR Codes. I downloaded it so I could brag that I can read QR codes, but this really doesn’t have much practical functionality for a mobile user in day-to-day Europe at this point. Hopefully, this will change soon, perhaps the above mentioned Socialight could integrate QR technology into their social tagging networks.
Games:
Dawn of the Fly is probably one of the most popular flash-based games for supporting handsets. It’s not much of a strategy game (I’m not much of a strategy gamer, either), just simple arcade fun. Go Sushi is another great pick, but requires some serious, eyeball-blistering concentration and nimble fingers.
A few potentially interesting mobile applications are:
Aka Aki – A German mobile social network
Gcalsync – Sync your gcal to mobile (doesn’t work for me)
Playtxt – A global social network
