Ah Sony… you take Nokia’s Symbian operating system and make is so much better… yet you still fail at providing advertised features! Your advert shows Facebook, Twitter, all integrated into the phone… yet they’re not, and Sony’s own blog recommends using snaptu, or symabook (in ALPHA!) to get this functionality…
THE SONY BOX features a mystery facebook app – but is this on the phone, pre-loaded, or available anywhere? Not to my knowledge…
Someone, somewhere*** says you can upload images STRAIGHT to Facebook – this is simply not possible without MANUALLY adding your own personalised email address to the phone! And where’s the direct uploading to Twitter? Nowhere, it doesn’t exist. The phone comes with built in setup to send photos to message (MMS, email), bluetooth, To web – which features Blogger*, PicasaWeb, Webalbum**, Flickr, Youtube, and Other…
“Other” lets you add stuff, for example, you can add your personalized facebook email address to and this will work quite well to upload photos (you can also send MMS to facebook’s email address, and add them as a contact to speed up the process), without you having to spend money sending MMS messages.
* Blogger is most annoying of all, this will upload your photos to a brand new blog on blogger.com – how about letting us upload to our own already existing blog?
** Webalbum takes you to Sony’s “PlayNow” website, and simply says “There are no items available” so basically doesn’t work.
*** will confirm source.
I’ll update this further on the phone… but for now, I’m slightly unimpressed. And what happened to the Cybershot branding?
Links: Flickr Satio Photos
And on the subject of Symbian – it seems like Sony and Nokia are using Symbian for some unknown reason, like these projects started years ago before they realised that they should be developing for Android. Motorola “decided to axe the entire Symbian product line as well as phones using several other operating systems.” (NYTimes) and have just released one of the most impressive new phones: The Motorola Droid based on Android 2.0. Even Nokia seem to be hedging their bets by developing new phones with Linux based operating systems: The Nokia N900 / based on Maemo.
If web connectivity and the ability to upload to social networking sites isn’t built into the core of a mobile phone operating system these days, then it just isn’t good enough, and releasing apps (Sony), patches (Nokia), and updates for features that should have come with the phone, isn’t the right way to go about it. By the time your updates are available, people will have already jumped ships, and will simply be “putting up” with the phone until they can get out of their contract, or get rid of their phone, to switch to an iPhone, or an Android phone.
