24 November 2009

Nokia Image Exchange
For S60 Gets Activity Notifications

Nokia Image Exchange is an experimental imaging service to make browsing and sharing images fun and easy. It aims to provide a seamless integration of a mobile image gallery application and a corresponding web-service.

The just released update is based on your feedback, comments and requests and therefore it will meet your needs even better. In addition to multiple bug fixes and accelerometer support for 3.2 devices, it brings notifications to inform you about activities relating to your images and contacts. Notifications are cinfigurable and inform you about new images from your friends present in the People menu as well as comments to your images and images that you have commented.

The new version also includes changes to the way connections are made and includes new load balancing architecture that should provide better responsiveness for more users.

The Nokia Image Exchange team has been studying the possibilities of a touch UI version of the application. Unfortunately, the version released now doesn't yet support touch devices, but stay tuned.

By the way, NIE team have also updated the version of Nokia Image Exchange available in Ovi Store. It is more stable than earlier (but doesn't have the features described above), and is downloadable there for supported phones.

Image Exchange explores user experience when the mobile phone is enabled with an always-on data connection and utilizes existing contact information as a basis for social networking. A few notable highlights include: automatic account creation, automatic back up and synchronization of image data, instant sharing, notifications about new images from contacts and a web interface for uploading and downloading images.

The major driving force we had in developing Image Exchange was convenience. We wanted to get rid of unnecessary hassles with account creations, transferring images and image sharing. Image Exchange uses its own accounts and creates these accounts for you automatically. Your phone’s images get backed up to the service in the background so you don’t need to manually upload them. In many cases they are ready for you to view them via desktop web browsers.

Sharing features detect other Image Exchange users from your address book automatically and allow you to share images to them without ever knowing their usernames. But we also wanted to make it easy to see what your friends are sharing to you. When your friends publish or share new images, they are automatically and almost instantly pushed onto your device. Likewise, Image Exchange keeps track on comments posted to your images as well as those you have commented.

Image Exchange web interface is not just for viewing images with your web browser. You can use it to put titles and descriptions onto your images as well as to comment other people’s photos. The changes you make are reflected to your mobile device. It is also possible to send links to your public images so that others can see them even if they were not Image Exchange users.

In case you do not wish to utilize online connectivity, the Image Exchange mobile client works as a standalone gallery application. After creating screen-optimized thumbnails, it works as a very nice and fast image gallery.

Note: The first time you use Image Exchange it may be initially slow as it generates image thumbnails and uploads images onto your private web account. If available, you can use a WiFI network and charger during this period. After initial upload the application should be quite fast.

Very Important Notice: Nokia Image Exchange is an experimental research project by Nokia Research Center. It can transfer very large amounts of data. A flat-fee data plan or WiFi access is essentially required. For similar mainstream Nokia services, check out Nokia Ovi Share.