Blogging from Everest

Last week, as I was icing my feet after walking on a bed of hot coals, I thought to myself, "I wish I could share this exciting experience with the world instantly." I asked my friend I met while backpacking through Asia, as he prepared my bed of nails to sleep on, "Isn't there some sort of technology that can show my friends and family how adventurous I am?" He pulled a Blackberry from the pocket of his tunic and suggested I invest in a new cell phone with blogging capabilities.\nSony Ericsson and Google announced a new line of cell phones that enable users to update their Blogger.com accounts from their mobile devices. This means that from your cell phone, you can snap a picture and put it online instantly. \nInitially, it sounds like a pretty innovative idea. \nGoogle and Sony's new product seems incredibly convenient: Consumers might mistake it for an arbitrary feature. \nBloggers of the world must be living very exciting lives right now. If this product makes it big, I'm hoping to see more photos from wrestling with alligators and climbing Mount Everest than of chubby \nsquirrels outside Woodburn. Surely bloggers will be glad they can post photos of their adventures online because they couldn't make a call near the no-service zone in Chernobyl. \nSony Ericsson does, however, make a good attempt to create a user-intuitive product. The newer camera phones have a 3.2 mega pixel quality, which is close to the best a mobile phone has seen. From Sony's perspective, it seems natural to connect camera phones and the Web. \nBut for an average cell phone user, how many photos would he or she realistically take that must be instantly uploaded online? With the short life spans tech gadgets already have, the number must lie somewhere between zero and one. It hardly seems like bloggers are in an uproar because posting photos and entries online is too difficult.\nThe new phones include a handful of features that encourage anyone with eyes and deep pockets to become a professional photographer. It was recently announced that the new blog-friendly phones will be released in the second quarter of 2006. So far, no price has been released, but they are sure to cost somewhere in the mid-hundreds. Buying a superior digital camera for less money is a far better investment than a phone that will be outdated in a year. \nMany mobile device convergence products are actually convenient and useful. Motorola's combination of iTunes and cell phones, for example, is a natural grouping of two devices that are intended to be small, mobile and attractive to a wide audience. \nI would rather see cell phone makers focus on producing better quality speakerphone technology or easier access to my address book. It puzzles me that blogging software became a cell phone standard before Google Maps. \nI am crossing my fingers, hoping consumers won't waste their money -- but hey, people bought the iPod Shuffle.