Thanks to James Whatley at The Really Mobile Project, we’ve discovered that the 5 EUR price of ShoZu on Nokia’s Ovi Store is no mistake – they’ve decided that moving forward, the initial download of their mobile app will cost. The service will, apparently, still be free, as well as their other applications, which include a desktop application for PC and Mac, MMS, and mobile email services.
To be honest, I think ShoZu has jumped the shark here. The service started out as a simple solution to the glaring problem with Share Online – the inability to upload to any service aside from Flickr, Vox, or now Ovi Share. I used ShoZu on nearly every phone leading up to my Nokia N95-3, and we’ve posted quite frequently on it. Unfortunately, the N95-3 marked the downfall of ShoZu, in my opinion.
For starters, the application never ran quite right on the N95, even with later firmwares. This was also the time that ShoZu began adding pointless ‘extras’, such as the ability to download weird podcast-type streams of content such as photos and whatnot. Their app subsequently became extremely bloated, laden with features that nobody requested or wanted. They also failed to keep up with today’s phones in terms of video quality, failing to upload files larger than 10MB. A 15-second video taken by my Nokia N79 racks in at 7MB, to give you a rough idea of how ridiculous that limitation is.
More recently, newcomers such as Pixelpipe have rocked the Symbian media-sharing world, tightly integrating with the existing Share Online application to simply solve the problem, and not add additional heft with unneeded features.
There are still a few unanswered questions, though. ShoZu began showing ads in its mobile client a while back – will those ads continue to show, even for folks who shelled out for the application? Also, will this charge be for each time you download the mobile client? If I buy a new phone, and want to have ShoZu installed on it – in addition to my existing phone – will I have to pay again?
I’m not knocking them just for trying to make some money – it’s quite obvious that any company *has* to generate revenue, at some point, eventually. It just seems like an odd strategy, that’s all. What do you think? Will you continue to use – and pay for – ShoZu, or will you switch to something like PixelPipe?
UPDATE: ShoZu got ahold of us, and let us know that the app will indeed cost for new users, and will be available through the major app stores priced at “$4.99 or the minimum charge based on the specifics of the App Store.” ShoZu has also “decided to not actively sell ad space.” which means that, at least, if you shell out for the app, you won’t have to see ads, either. No word on the 10MB video limit that’s been annoying users since 2007, though.
