Not surprising to see this NPD report about the missed opportunities in sharing camera phone pictures: 50% of U.S. subscribers have camera phones, but only 20% of consumers with camera phones actually share them wirelessly. 80% of the time people just…

I’d love to be in a mobile industry where the handset manufacturers made it easy to get at the handset hardware from the internet. While it is only possible to upload pix via MMS and email, that remains a big barrier to developing better apps.

If a 3rd party app could use a more flexible and faster transport to upload handset media to a server it would really help developers build better apps. Better apps might drive more use, increase imaging revenue for carriers. Maybe that could help convince carriers to get their fingers out of it and be happy with the additional data revenue.

Hope we see an open-source phone soon! Go Surj Patel!

“For future reference:

“deciphering their jpg encoding”

There’s only one way to encode a jpg, and that’s as a jpg. We don’t actually decode anything, that’s done by your web browser. Occasional messages have corrupt jpg headers, but that’s nothing to do with the carriers.

“specific scripts for *every* carrier”

We don’t have specific scripts for every carrier, we have a few switches that handle specific cases, but the general system handles the vast majority of carriers, even the weirdy ones.”

there I go with my *I understand it speak*.

@ william – concerning MMS to photo sites, mms to web is fine, in fact almost all handsets have a “send to email address” in their MMS functionality. The trick lies in the receiving sites mail parser (and this is in answer to Muzagga really), as a moblogging site you have to write specific scripts for *every* carrier, stripping out the accompanying spam, and deciphering their jpg encoding in order to publish it to the moblog. All good moblog sites are constantly developing this side of their service to cater to changes in the way operators send mms to email.

This is a really important post Carlo, I hope the carriers are paying attention

Anywas, we have had som problems with some carriers, because they put some HTML stuff into the MMS created, (a template and some ads). Every new carrier we support is very important to us, and it is getting easier and easier.

So maybe MMS is easier for the moblogger to use, but email is easier for the guys (like us) coding and providing the moblogservice.

The biggest problem as I see it is with the user interface of most phones. It just takes too long to send anything meaningful, and to be honest things will only get interesting once mobile input is streamlined and _more_ than just images and a sentence or two of text can be sent in a snap. When or if that will happen remains to be seen.

One issue is that photo websites CAN’T accept a MMS, because we don’t have MMS shortcodes yet.

So email is still the preferred way of getting a photo from a phone to a photo sharing website.