My mom and dad both love taking photos with their cell phones and then texting them to me. As much as I enjoy receiving them, I hate the way they take for-freaking-ever to display on my phone. I also hate having photos on my cell phone. (You can’t do anything with them there!) Today I had an idea. “I wonder if you can send camera photos via email instead of only via SMS?” I gave it a shot and it works! I don’t know about all carriers, but if you have Cingular, you can text a cell phone photo to an email address instead of to someone else’s cell phone. That is extra cool.
Click “Store”, then “Send in Message”. Instead of selecting a name from your address book, just enter an email address. It’s that simple. Now I can save all these pictures of my dad golfing and my mom’s cats on my computer. I can Photoshop them and crop them and send them to my friends and archive them and treat them just like … well … real digital photos. All I have to do is convince them to do this…
I have a Motorola RAZR with Bluetooth support, so, yes, I could just download the photos from my phone to my laptop. But that requires about ten minutes of configuring the Bluetooth on my phone and then enabling the Bluetooth on my laptop and then finding the device and locating the files on my phone … blah blah blah … It’s a pain in the neck.
This works for Verizon too. Working in the media we are constantly dealing with our reporters sending us photos for the website from the field. We’ve found that we can send emails to their phones (Verizon assigns each phone an email address) as well as get emails from their phones.
Its quite handy when you are driving down I-95 and there’s a massive wreck you know you really should call in, and all you have is a freakin’ cell phone camera.