[pct-l] Smart phones & Photos

[Brian Lewis]

David asked: "How to send camera photos from a Blackberry (smart phone)? Is
it as simple as taking the micro card out of the camera and putting in the
phone? By doing this can you attach the photos to your email?"

There's more than one option, depending on your particular smartphone and
whether you have internet service, and whether your camera is integrated
with your phone or --- as your question implies --- that you also carry a
standalone camera.   Having an integrated device is a potential advantage,
because you then already have your photos on a device that's capable of
emailing them or uploading them to your trail journal or some other upload
site (flikr, whatever).    This might not work as well as you might imagine,
however, depending on your internet connection quality and speed and the
quality (size) of photos that your camera takes.   When you're in a town
with good cell reception, this helps (consult Halfmile's accumulation of
cell phone reception info at http://www.pctmap.net/cell/).  Ditto if you
have wi-fi available.   I don't know what 3G will do to this; I had AT&T's
Edge network for my hike this past year, and I had anticipated that I would
just compress and batch send a bunch of photos home periodically via email
attachment, and while I did that a few times, it was ultimately too tedious
and time consuming to continue.   So I ended up just uploading about a photo
a day to my trail journal and accumulating other photos.    I got those home
by literally downloading them when I was at home.  I had other options, but
this worked well enough for me given the dynamics of my particular trip and
how memory card space freed up on the device as I moved north and removed
large GPS map files.

Assuming you really want to carry an additional camera (it's anticipated
that going forward smartphone built-in cameras will improve ...), then
(again, depending on your particular smartphone), it should work fine to
swap cards to move the photos onto the smartphone, assuming you can get
compatible cards for both.  For example, if your smartphone uses a microSD
card and your camera uses a miniSD card, your mini-SD card could actually be
a micro that's in a mini "sleeve".  I know for a fact that process works on
my phone.  It's always possible that your camera would format the card in a
way that your phone wouldn't accept, but I suspect it would work for most
smartphones (?).     IMO it would be a bit tedious operation, however, and
smartphone internal memory is limited.     I would suggest that part of your
criteria for picking a smartphone be that its functionality include a camera
that you consider adequate.   I was happy with the photos from the 2 MB
camera that's part of my smartphone; I won't enlarge them to poster size,
and of course my camera functionality was quite limited, but I'm a
point-and-shoot type of guy anyway, and the smaller native photo size made
it easier to upload, and made the resulting photos file sizes small enough
to directly upload to my trail journal without having to manipulate them in
any way.   I gave a mini-slide show of some photos recently on a 50" plasma
TV and they looked great at that size.

I walked with Halfmile for a bit on the trail this year and he carried an
actual Blackberry (there are a whole lot of smartphones out there, beyond
just Blackberry and Ipod ...), so if it's a Blackberry in particular that
you're interested in, he can doubtless give you a more specific answer.

If you are looking to select a smartphone for a long distance hike, some
additional things to think about are here:
http://postholer.com/smartPhone.html


Brian Lewis
http://postholer.com/brianle