Oh how I wish my craptacular phone had a camera

I have a craptacular phone. It really sucks. What is it??? Its a Blackberry!!! I hate it. Sure I can fancy it up with some themes, but its still the same crap phone it was before. To be specific, its a 8700g and the carrier is KPN in the Netherlands. But then I have had a lot of crappy phones. There was one exception...the Audiovox 5600. That was the best phone I ever used. It always worked, apart from that time I crushed it in the car door. But it never hung, which is something the Blackberry likes to do...often. Ugghhh....

So there is a reason I am going off on this phone again. Today I stumbled on a cool service called Qipit. If you had a normal, less crappy phone with a camera, you could take a picture of a whiteboard or a document, and Qipit sends you a PDF version of it. No idea if its just a PDF wrapper around the image or if its a searchable PDF, but it apparently cleans up the image first. If it does OCR it and make it searchable, it would be interesting if it supports other languages beyond English.

Anyway, they also go a step further. They also allow you to specify an email address or fax number in the message you send to Qipit and it will then get sent on to the intended recipient. That is way cool!!! Now of course its not managed by your company so there is no way for them to figure out how many faxes have been sent from their employees, but for personal use, its fantastic.

PS. I found out about this from the TravelGearBlog

#1 Conrad Hamenter on 12.12.2007 at 4:13 PM

Sorry to hear your Blackberry does not have a camera, both the Perl and the Curve do, although they are not the best cameras.  We are hopeful RIM will continue to upgrade their camera modules in future releases. If you are not addicted to email, you may want to check out the Nokia N95 or the Sony Ericsson K850, both have 5 mega pixel cameras and are plenty sweet!

To answer your questions about qipit, we run processing on the images to clean them up by dewarping, deblurring, removing shadowing, and glare.  Then we allow the end user to tag the documents, which makes them searchable.  You can even share your document with a URL or a Thumbnail Script for your blog.  Here is a link to the a test page taken with the Nokia N95, that shows how easy it is to share with qipit.  

www.qipit.com/.../nokia_n95_works_great_with_qipit

Be sure to click the original picture tab to see the qipit magic in action.

Thanks for the post. ~ Conrad (w/ qipit)