ShoZu - Love/Hate, Part 3
Ok. So I first said they were going down the tubes, then retracted the statement with the N76, and now, less than 48 hours back on my N95, I’ve deleted ShoZu, and I’m missing it hard-core. If you’re thinking, "Ricky, seriously, come on already," you’re absolutely right. Only you shouldn’t be directing that towards me. You should be directing that towards ShoZu. What?
Ok, here’s the skinny. I LOVE SHOZU. ShoZu allows me to truly enjoy my technology and use it to enable and enrich real life. It’s that simple, and that’s exactly what technology should be doing. With ShoZu on my device, I can easily and without doing a thing snap photos and have them upload to Flickr, Facebook and Twango, and just about any other online photosharing site I wish. Not bad.
Not bad except for that thus far, it’s only ran successfully on a phone with a piddly 2MP camera.
Who wants to share pictures taken with that poor of quality? Meanwhile my sexy beast of an N95, with the
mighty 5MP Carl Zeiss lens, is left out in the cold. Why for? It’s not
like the N95 is JUST out on the market. It’s been publicly available
since early this Spring. And it’s not like developers (especially
recognized ones such as ShoZu) couldn’t get their hands on one early. And I’m not buying the whole "The N95 has too little RAM" spiel. It ran on the N73 and every other S60 before that with ~20MB of RAM.
So what gives?
I’ve tried to be nice, but I’m calling them out now: If you’re not
going to fix ShoZu on the N95, then just stop trying and admit you can’t do it. Seriously. I’ve
posted several times on their forums and haven’t seen a response in
weeks (I check every week or so). I’ve posted 2 times on my site here
and haven’t heard a single peep out of their PR department or anything (usually if I rant about something, I have an email within 48
like that
hrs asking to go over the situation in detail. The list of those
include Winksite, Orb, even Viddler (though I never got a 2nd response
from Viddler). They all at least pretend to be interested. ShoZu seems
to have a "well, we tested it on our N95 in the lab with nothing else
installed and it worked fine" attitude. Well, I don’t care what you tested, if it’s not working then you need to do something else. *Update* ShoZu has contacted me and we’re working on trying to fix things. I will update with a new post if anything changes.
Newsflash, ShoZu, PEOPLE INSTALL STUFF ON THEIR S60 DEVICES.
THAT’S WHAT THEY’RE FOR. Yesterday I had TalkPlus running (which is a
lightweight app and a requirement for me nowadays) and nothing else.
I tried to open the Gmail app and I got the out of memory error. Drat,
I thought, so I rebooted the device in an attempt to free up some RAM.
No dice, same thing from a fresh reboot. Uninstalled ShoZu, rebooted,
and tried it again, WA-LA! I haven’t seen an out of memory error since.
This is just piss-poor. And frankly, Nokia’s not helping. Sure they’ve
updated their web upload service, but I still have to interact with
that (ALOT, actually, to get it to do anything). Where is my no-click
upload?! I don’t want the Vox app, because I don’t use Vox. I need
another blog like I need a hole in my head.
All I’m asking for is a simple no-click way to upload my photos. That’s
it. Is it so hard to ask? I’m not even asking for videos anymore (I’ve
given that up, sadly no one wants to do it. Again, piss-poor). All I
want is something that sits on my device and uploads stuff to Flickr.
If it works with Twango, too, great. Facebook? Cool, but not required.
Personally, I wish ShoZu would release a "ShoZu Lite" client that
doesn’t have all that messy ZuCasts and Contacts sync business. Stick
to what you know, ShoZu, stick to what you know.
So I guess I didn’t read about what Shozu actually is and does enough, but lo and behold, it appears as though it allows me to upload to flickr with my new E90! Yay!
The test pic worked (ok, it’s a stupid picture, but it’s only a test) http://www.flickr.com/photos/8046879@N04/1128403290/
So this is a successful test on a device with a 3.2MP camera. There you go. I’ll try it out a bit more over the coming days and weeks… hopefully it’ll keep working in a stable manner.
-Pete
last time I installed shozu (on nokia n80), it tried every second to connect to the network…
for flickr I use this
http://www.flickr.com/nokia
[quote]for flickr I use this
http://www.flickr.com/nokia/quote
Right, but for us E series users we’re out in the cold. no such functionality was included in the gallery/camera app.
-Pete
Have you tried zonetag?
http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com/
Zonetag is unsupported for any S60v3 devices it was great 12 months ago, talk about no updates.
Shozu is even more broken on an unbranded N75, the install fails at the last part, and now I have a shozu icon on my phone but it does not start and is also not listed in the app manager to remove. Pressing ‘c’ also just give an error “Unable to delete ‘ShoZu’”
Zonetag has S60v3 support.
I agree. I’ve been playing with ShoZu, Picasa, Flickr, Nokia Upload, Locr and anything else I can get my hands on to really maximize my device. I have a camera that has internet and geo-tagging capabilities, but I can’t find a tool that smoothly integrates it all. The memory thing is driving me bonkers. I haven’t yet uninstalled ShoZu, but I’m definitely loosing my patience. If anyone has a solution or gets an answer from someone, please let me know.
Hi Ricky
You should put your wish for no-click upload to Flickr on the new S60 wishlist and ask your readers to vote for it:
http://www.s60.com/business/productinfo/wishlist/displayWishList.do
Hi Ricky,
I’m sorry to hear about the memory problems you are experiencing whilst using ShoZu on your N95. Since your posts on the ShoZu forum, we have tried to contact you on the 2 email addresses you have on file with us but have not yet received a response. We are eager to hear back from you so that we can try to replicate the problem you are experiencing.
I will send an email to the address listed on your blog site with the details we require to further investigate this problem.
Kind regards,
Jared Irons
ShoZu Support Manager
Thanks for the comment and email Jared. I’ve updated the post to reflect that you have contacted me, and look forward to updating my readers even more as we work together to figure this out.