One of the tools I’d hoped to use the most on my trip is Share Online, on my trusty Nokia N95-3. I made sure to have the latest version loaded up on my phone, and I have my Calitrip2008 channel set as the default – to make things super-easy. Unfortunately, Share Online sucks, plain and simple. Don’t get me wrong – it does its job of uploading your photos with geotagging info intact to the correct Share on Ovi channel. However, it’s *how* it does this, and the followup and overall experience that makes Share Online completely and utterly worthless. Let me break it down for you.
Speed - When I’m on vacation, and snapping photos, I want to do just that – snap photos, and lots of them. I also, obviously, want to share those with others as quickly as possible, which is one reason I like to use my N95-3 and Share Online. Unfortunately, the experience is anything but snappy, and it’s not the phone’s fault. First off, and this is something I’ve griped about before, there’s no option to just upload everything. ShoZu does this, though, and I’m honestly wishing I’d set that up before coming on the trip.
So, since there’s no auto-upload, you have to click the ‘Share’ icon, which isn’t a real big deal. It’s right there, after you take a photo you just click it and off the photo goes, destined for the interwebs. However, for some stupid reason, Share Online thinks I need to see all the steps involved in that. I get switched temporarily to show that it’s opening the service, then I get a confirmation that it’s STARTED uploading, and then a few minutes later, I get a confirmation that it is finished uploading. I don’t care. I want to click the button and be off snapping my next photo. Showing me the behind-the-scenes process is an instant FAIL.
Even worse, pertaining to the overall speed, is that I can’t upload more than one thing at a time – ULTRA FAIL. Basically, I have to wait for each photo to finish uploading, if I want to use the handy-dandy Share icon from the camera application. If I want to upload in batches, I first of all have to open the gallery, and select up to 6 photos. Yes, that’s right, there’s a completely arbitrary limit of 6 items at a time. Thus, when I had over 50 photos from my trip to Alcratraz on Friday, I was stuck uploading those 6 at a time (which I did NOT have time for). I gave up, after uploading a few batches, as my day didn’t have time to wait for me to upload photos. That leads to the next issue….
History - There’s zero indication of what I have and haven’t uploaded to Share on Ovi using Share Online. None, zilch, nada. So……..if I stopped uploading in the middle of the day (which I did), then I have to open the channel on either my phone (not going to happen) or my computer, and compare, one-by-one, the photos that I already uploaded, to see which ones I’d missed.
Basically, after the first 2-3 hours of our first day of tourism in San Francisco, I completely gave up on Share Online. Technology should enrich and enable your real life – NOT get in the way and slow you down when you’re on vacation. For this trip, Share Online is a complete and utter fail. Next trip, I’ll be using ShoZu, without a doubt.
Note: Share on Ovi has been BRILLIANT. I was able to use the web-based mass uploader to upload 100+ photos each night, without a problem. The ones that are geotagged (vs the photos taken with Mrs. Guru’s digicam) are even available on a map – WIN.
