We were able to witness this ourselves during a recent sortie in Hong Kong when mobile giant Nokia unveiled the newest line of phones in its much-vaunted N- Series.In that event, Nokia announced its tie-up with Flickr, presently the largest online photo sharing community which is used by majority of bloggers to upload and display their pictures on the web. The system enables Nokia N-Series owners to upload their full-size photos to Flickr directly from the phone camera by clicking on the Web Upload portion in the image Gallery. One can also add tags, comments and descriptions; most of all, they can be sent to one’s blog as well as edited and organized.

Our fearless forecast is that mobile blogging will be the rule, rather than the exception, in the very near future, as more and more mobile phones are born in the market that will possess the needed functionalities suited to the blogging craft. As we have seen in Nokia’s latest offerings, these phones will have built-in software and applications that will make it easy to compose and edit text and images while on the move. We can  only hope that mobile operators will keep the costs down, which is highly possible if demand increases.

Jawahar Kanjilal, Director of Multimedia Experiences for Nokia in Asia-Pacific told Technews that blogging is just one of the many diverse activities made possible as a new generation of mobile phones become virtual walking computers, capable of doing what your home or office desktop can do and even more.

“Being able to share a spontaneously captured photo with friends, or even complete strangers, is easy when  you have a connected computer sitting in your pocket, that is why we added support for services like Flickr to our Nokia N-Series devices,” said Kanjilal.

Nokia has the Nokia Lifeblog 2.0 which “fuses a private diary and a weblog” by collecting a timeline of pictures, videos and text messages taken from a Nokia mobile phone. The user can browse the content, add text notes, or share content straight from the application on the device. One can free up memory space on the phone by installing the Lifeblog software on Windows PC which will enable you to browse your content on a bigger screen and easily create longer text posts to a blog. Nokia’s Lifeblog interface enables easy set-up for formatting of the posts and also remembers where to post safely so there will be no sending to the wrong address. Multiple photos or videos can be sent, the content size is unlimited and metadata can be included in the post, offering a very flexible method for posting to the web from a mobile device.

Nokia has been working on the development of the ATOM standard to enable more blogging service providers such as SixApart to offer mobile blogging with Nokia Lifeblog. “The ease of use can increase the usage of these services, and make people likely to blog on the move,” Nokia said.

The future of mobile blogging is bright if we consider the phenomenon that is Web 2.0 and the increasing use of mobile phones to browse the internet. Mobile broadband connections are already available on a variety of mobile devices, making it possible for consumers to browse the web like they do at home or in the office. 3G wireless connections offer transfer speeds of up to 300 kbps while many new devices have built-in WiFi capabilities. As HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) networks are introduced in the near future, consumers will have access to transmission speeds of up to 10MB per second on their mobile. Isn’t that amazing?

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