A Weekend With the Camera

Back from my mini-trip down to Southern California for the weekend and I certainly made heavy use of my phone while down there. One of the main ways was as my surrogate camera. I made the conscious decision to leave behind my Canon for this trip and see what it would be like to rely solely on the Palm Pre for any photo opportunities.

I have to say, that it performed admirably at this task. One thing I did run into was that I started getting tired of lightly smudging my screen with my fingers having to press the touch green button to shutter the camera when the Pre has a perfectly functional physical button. Then again, I am struck by no immediate solution to how to exit the camera card if I were given the option to make the center button a camera shutter instead of the minimize/maximize button.

Besides the taking of the pictures and the organizing of them, which was also quite simplistic and easy to manage, I decided to test out the mobile uploading capability of the Pre. First the good, it works and it works quickly and easily. Bring up the photo album, navigate to the picture you want to upload and you are given options to assign it to a contact, set it as the wallpaper, share via email or mms and to upload it. For those capabilities, the Pre does them all wonderfully.

Now the bad. There is not enough choice. Uploading only seems to work with Facebook and Photobucket. No support for Flickr, Picasa or any other online photo service. That is irritating, though with a healthy proportion of my minor complaints about the Pre so far, I believe this will get implemented in the relatively near future. The other part that would be really useful to have would be a solid batch job option both for organizing and for uploading. That is not a huge missing feature though given that it can be done after transferring the photos to a computer and I do not foresee myself needing to upload a ton of pictures to Facebook or Flickr with immediacy being the utmost importance, but I am sure it would have been nice for some out there.