Most mobile phones these days come with a basic camera built-in. It’s handy for spur-of-the-moment snapshots. I’ve used it in stores to capture price and SKU info for further research, or to document that fender-bender in the parking lot.
What’s not convenient is a way to share those photos online. Sure, a lot of the mobile companies have services, but if you’re already using something like Flickr, you don’t want or need another online gallery.
A number of companies have created add-ons that allow uploads from your mobile to Flickr, including Shozu, Nokia and Yahoo’s own Zonetag. But none of these would work with my HP iPAQ hw6515.
Enter Nakama. This free service allows you to upload photos from any mobile phone capable of sending picture messages. While Nakama does provide it’s own online gallery, the real strength is it’s ability to automatically publish uploaded photos to your Flickr, MySpace or Live Space account.
I’ve tested Nakama, and it worked perfectly. No special software was required, just the ability to send picture messages from my phone.
One caveat — the gallery of popular photos on Nakama contains a lot of suggestive photos. They do provide a “flag as inappropriate” capability, but so far, the majority of visitors apparently approve. Personally, I don’t give a rip about their own gallery; I’m only interested in using the service to make it easy to post to Flickr. And that it does quite well.
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