A great idea

Digital photo frames are a great idea, displaying your favourite snaps as a slide show without tying up the telly. Their big drawback is loading the pictures, which tends to involve removing a memory card, plugging it into your PC and transferring the new pics onto it.
The Parrot Photo Viewer allows you to send pics directly from your cameraphone to the view, instantly, via Bluetooth. It is really simple - just choose 'send via Bluetooth', pic 'Parrot Photo' from the list and press send. A few seconds later, the pic will appear on the screen.
Once you have the idea, it gets quite addictive. Every time you get a shot you like, you just press those buttons and add it to the show. And everyone in the house with a Bluetooth cameraphone can join in. Actually, under the default settings there is nothing to stop passers-by in the street outside sending their pictures too, but it can be set to respond only to authorised phones.
The screen is fairly small (3.5in) but this is a good thing if your cameraphone is only 1 megapixel or VGA. The colours are bright and contrast excellent.
The unit's 32 megabyte memory should be enough to store more than a hundred pics, though it cannot be expanded.
Being French, it is a lovely design, available in lots of finishes including many types of leather including calf (as shown) and crocodile, and Italian oak. There are a lot of paint effects too. It is beautifully made and should be an ornament to any living room. Beats the hell out of some cruddy tat I have seen.
A particularly cool feature is that you can display it either in portrait or landscape mode, and the screen automatically rotates the images to the right orientation.
All in all, an ideal Christmas present for Mum. It is simple enough for her to operate, but if she hasn't got round to getting a cameraphone you could upload the latest family snaps each time you visit!
By the way, if you think the picture looks a bit rough, I could have downloaded a few slick PR shots but I decided to take my own using the N70. That's a genuine Partridge family snap on the screen.
A bit pricey at £155 or so, but very tempting. Click here for more.

Fishbourne Show fireworks display

Sometimes, you just have to be there. How many times have you sat through an anecdote that your friend thinks the funniest thing since Kathy Kirby split her dress on live TV, and by the time he (almost always he) has finished, you are on the phone to the Samaritans?
Well, this picture doesn't actually bore you to death, but it transmits none of the anticipation, excitement and fear of the Fishbourne show fireworks display. It was really good, honest. We all went ooooh and aaaah, and clapped wildly whenever there was a gap that felt like a finale. But you had to be there.
Next year, I'll see if videophones can capture the spirit of the event.

Appledram church, Sussex

The lovely church at Appledram sits alone in the fields near Chichester. This picture of the humble exterior was taken to contrast with the relatively lavish 13th century marble columns and fancy windows in the chancel (below). I uploaded it from the scene but either I pressed the wrong button or it got lost in the ether so here it is again.
The interior shot shows how much quality goes in low light, though the image would have been much sharper if the cameraphone had been mounted on a tripod. But hauling a tripod around for a phone would be, frankly, bonkers.

Appledram's dramatic interior

Photo enhancement

This is what you can do to improve cameraphone pics with one click of a button in Microsoft Digital Image Suite. The 'cameraphone auto fix' button does a tremendous job of brightening and sharpening cameraphone images. The sunset picture below is just as it came out of the camera, and here it is again after the auto fix treatment. Much brighter and a lot of detail that is wrapt in gloom in the original is brought out. The only downside is the file size, which goes up from 220kB to 891kB.

Sunset over the Mill Pond, Emsworth

Digital cameras tend to have a bad response to low light, which is very frustrating for clubbers in dank cellars who want to share pictures of the revels (look at us! We're legless!) with all their friends. So I didn't have much hope when I pointed the N70 at the sunset over Emsworth's Mill Pond last night, but it came out rather well. Good contrast in the cloud formations helped.

Posting difficulty

My post from Battersea seems to have gone directly to the archive - a bit like a film going direct to video I suppose. This is a test post just to see if the index page is still working.
The picture is of the lovely church at Upwaltham, Sussex.

Battersea Poly queue

Battersea Poly queue
Originally uploaded by chrismpartridge.

My attempt to blog directly from the scene yesterday failed, although I did manage to upload pictures to Flickr with proper captions, laboriously entered on the phone keyboard. But I couldn't get the pictures onto the blog - this one was blogged later from my home PC. It shows property-obsessed Londoners queuing for the chance to buy flats in the old Battersea Poly building.
I will now try and work out how to post directly from phone to blog.

Me and Sandpiper at Bosham

Me and Sandpiper at Bosham
Originally uploaded by chrismpartridge.

This is one of the photos that bust the bandwidth barrier at Flickr. It was taken using my Kodak DX 6490. I think I look suitably sailiorly, but my wife thinks I just look silly. Arrr, soigh....

I can use Flickr again!

Last month I went bonkers and uploaded a few big, high resolution images to my Flickr account and discovered that I had exceeded my bandwidth limit and would be barred from uploading any more until August. Disaster! Well, today's the day, and I will celebrate by learning how to link Flickr to this blog. I may even try and add captions, but as I am the world's worst texter (unlike this guy) it may not happen.

What this blog is about

I got addicted to cameraphones since I discovered Flickr. The ability to take a snap on my Nokia N70 and post it directly on the Web for everyone to enjoy blew my mind.
But choosing a cameraphone means making compromises. The latest cameraphones such as the Nokia N93 and the amazing LG Chocolate are superb cameras but bulky phones with limited battery life. Because the image quality is high, the files are big and they need high-capacity memory cards, which don't come cheap. And uploading the images to your web site will be an expensive business if you do it at full quality.
In this blog I will be looking at developments in cameraphones and looking at whether new advanced features really do make picture taking easier or better for us snappers.