Underexposed

The official Flickr app for iPhone and iPod Touch offers search, browse, and upload features.

Better late than never? Following in the footsteps of countless third-party efforts, Flickr has finally made its official debut in the App Store.

The app hits the ground running--make that scrolling--with a slick Ken Burns-style slideshow of hand-picked images from the site.

An initial tap of the Recent, You, or Contacts button along the bottom leads you through a one-time authorization process (which requires a visit to Safari), after which you gain access to the respective user-account features on Flickr.

You can also search for photos and videos, of course, and do all the usual stuff with whatever you find: add to favorites, share via e-mail, leave a comment, etc.

Of course, the main appeal here is uploading: You can snap and upload a photo on the fly or choose an existing snapshot from your library. The app lets you assign the photo to a set, add tags (including a geotag from your current location), and choose a privacy level.

In short, the official Flickr app does just about everything you'd want it to (except batch uploads, that is), and with simplicity and style. It's free, of course, and it works with both free and Pro accounts.

So this begs the question: is there an existing third-party app that "does Flickr" better than Flickr's own app? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The camera in Apple's upcoming iPhone 3G S sports not just video, but also some new features besides the usual not-so-useful bump in megapixels.

The phone, available next week in the United States and some other countries, comes with a 3-megapixel camera compared to the current iPhone 3G's 2 megapixels. It can shoot video at 30 frames per second at VGA (640x480) resolution, matching competing phones and addressing a shortcoming of the current phones.

Videos can be edited on the iPhone 3G S by trimming the sequence of still images taken from the video.

(Credit: Apple)

But the iPhone 3G S can do more than just shoot video, said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, at the company's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference here. People can share videos through e-mail, MMS, Apple's MobileMe service, and YouTube.

And taking advantage of the iPhone's relatively powerful hardware, people can "scrub" through a video--that is, click and drag to fast-forward and rewind--as they watch to jump to the spot they want. Likewise, they can trim videos to pare back to the desired portion. The scrubbing and trimming uses an interface that displays the video as a filmstrip sequence of still frames.

The iPhone 3G S also includes still camera upgrades for the photography crowd--and it should be noted that the iPhone rivals SLRs for activity on Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing site, outpacing all mobile phones and all but one actual camera.

First is autofocus. Mobile phones' tiny image sensors often mean everything is in focus whether you want it to be or not, but the iPhone 3G S will let come with autofocus to try to ensure that the right part of the image is sharp. A feature called "tap to focus" lets people tap on the screen image to focus the camera on a particular part of the image--foreground or background, for example.

Yahoo's Flickr site puts the iPhone head and shoulders above other mobile phones for popularity on the photo-sharing site.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Coming along with autofocus is an automacro mode, too, for close-up shots, Schiller said.

Apple also said the new phone has better low-light performance--a common bugaboo not merely for mobile phone cameras but for regular point-and-shoot models as well.

The iPhone 3G S will cost $199 for a 16GB model and $299 for a 32GB model, Apple said. Other features include better battery life and faster performance.

I have proof from an expert that the iPhone interface really is better. Who's the expert? My 3-year-old son.

Over the years, I've seen countless newbies struggle to use the latest gadget, computer, or software. I like new technology, but it's been work hauling myself up learning curves.

But I'm convinced that after years stuck with only modest tweaks to the WIMP interface--windows, icons, menus, pointing device--real change is upon us. That's chiefly because the pointing devices now can be your own fingers.

Levi types random words on the iPhone's notepad application.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Within moments of his first crack at an iPhone, my son, Levi, had figured out how to flip from one photo to another by flicking his finger across the screen. He understood with no coaching how to steer the simulated steel ball around the holes in the Labyrinth game by tilting the phone. He loves to type nonsense words on the notepad application using the virtual keyboard, deleting them once they've been read. In the three months since I got the iPhone 3G, Levi has learned to take photos, browse them, change the phone's wallpaper, and, unfortunately, turn off Wi-Fi and switch on airplane mode.

My proudest moment came when Levi issued his first tweet, borrowing my account: "Eesfrrgjlphdvlksxnjjktwsdvnjmmkbvvnn." Though it was largely a matter of chance, of course, he could do it because he likes the cute bluebird icon of the Twitterific application, and touching it with his finger triggers entertaining interactions.

And I was intrigued when Levi tried unsuccessfully to use the phone's accelerometer to play JellyCar, trying to spur the car by tipping the iPhone so the car would "roll" downhill faster. Note to JellyCar developers: your user interface needs work.

Levi's first tweet

(Credit: CNET News)

As a parent, of course, it's tempting to assume that Levi's accomplishments are the result of his astounding intelligence. But of course much of the credit has to go to Apple and others who've advanced the state of the interface art.

"Human beings are a lot more programmed to manipulate things with our hands and fingers," said Dan Saffer, a founder of Kicker Studio and author of Designing Gestural Interfaces. "I was at a party with a Microsoft Surface table. There was an infant playing with it, not even a year old, pushing photos around and squealing. It's amazing how much it makes sophisticated computing power accessible to a hugely wide segment of the population."

Keyboards and mice aren't being replaced--they offer speed and precision for typing words, entering data, navigating documents, and issuing commands. But they are becoming just one of a host of mechanisms.

Touch screens, available on some Hewlett-Packard computers, are a big part of the revolution, letting people interact more directly rather than relying on a mouse, joystick, or other indirect pointing device. Multitouch sensors, which can detect multiple fingers simultaneously, add more sophistication, such as the ability to shrink a photo by making a pinching gesture on a trackpad. Newer Apple laptops offer more extensive use of multitouch, though at this stage only through the trackpad rather than a touch screen.

Levi took this picture of his feet with my iPhone while he was sitting in his car seat.

(Credit: Levi)

Computing devices also are getting ears and eyes. Speech recognition is available in rough form to power phone search on various phones with services from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Vlingo. FluidTunes lets you control your iTunes library by waving your hands in front of a Mac's video camera.

Intuitive, physical interfaces aren't just for kids. I was stunned to see my technophobic mother-in-law gleefully bowling with a Wii last year. Sure, she couldn't have installed Nintendo's still-popular gaming device if we'd paid her, but using it was as easy as tossing a pebble in a pond.

"There are Wii bowling tournaments now for elders. It takes a sport they love, but there's no weight of the ball anymore. They can play it in a wheelchair. It's a huge hit at nursing homes," Saffer said.

It's not just that devices are easier to use when you can touch the interface, he said. It's that it's easier to learn by watching others use them.

"One interesting thing about touch screens is there's this whole realm of observation you don't have with standard computer setups, where the icons are smaller, and it's hard to tell what people are doing by watching," he said. "You can learn how to use an iPhone by watching people flip through it for a second. You can get it in a way you can't with a standard phone, where you're watching people push buttons to get through menus."

Of course, immersion helps, too. Levi's parents spend altogether too much time punching at keyboards and staring at screens, so he's got plenty of examples to emulate his elders. As a camera buff, I'm delighted when Levi pretends to take pictures--he made a toy camera out of Lego once.

A view of Microsoft's Surface device at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel shows a list of entertainment options for hotel guests.

(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET News)

But I vacillate between pleasure that he's learning how to use technology and fear that he'll grow up ignorant of the non-electronic world. I'm prone to inordinate "screen time," a term heavily freighted with negative baggage in our household, and Levi's childhood will be far more digitally immersed than mine.

And perhaps worse, there's the prospect of losing my status as resident guru. There are plenty of more technically proficient people in my orbit, but none of them live in my house, and Levi doesn't ask any of them to read his typed nonsense words.

Most families come to some sort of reckoning when their son beats their dad in basketball. Ours will come when my wife asks Levi for technical support.

The iPhone has risen to prominence on Flickr, rivaling most SLRs in popularity. These statistics from Yahoo cover the last 12 months.

(Credit: Yahoo)

The iPhone is the mobile device of choice these days for doing most things that need a network. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the phone has carved out a prominent place on Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr.

The Flickr Camera Finder, Yahoo's statistical counter of camera use among its members, shows that since the arrival of the iPhone 3G model earlier this year, the phone has vaulted not only over all other camera phones, trouncing the Nokia N95 in second place, but also almost all ordinary cameras.

That's a notable accomplishment. I've been watching the Flickr Camera Finder for two years, and that's the first time I recall a camera phone placing so highly. The top ranks have been dominated by SLRs, the camera of choice for many of Flickr's heaviest users.

With the debut of the 3G model, Apple's iPhone surged to a commanding lead among camera phones used at Flickr. These statistics from Yahoo cover the last 12 months.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Right now the iPhone is in a virtual tie with Canon's Rebel XT and Nikon's D80, two SLRs whose popularity is waning with the arrival of newer models from the dominant makers of such cameras. Only Canon's newer Rebel XTi outranks the iPhone.

Though the trajectory is clear, there are caveats. First, Flickr measures popularity on the basis of the number of users who've uploaded a photo on a given day. In other words, the camera used by a person who uploads one photo a day will fare better than one who uploads 100 pictures one day a month. Second, many camera phones don't identify themselves to Flickr, so their use isn't logged. Last, these statistics fluctuate daily, and who knows what kind of anomalous behavior is going on during the holidays.

The total number of photos uploaded from the Rebel XTi is about 51 million, compared with 5.8 million for the iPhone. However, there are nearly 3,000 people uploading daily from their iPhone compared with about 6,500 for the XTi.

My guess is the iPhone's better-than-average network abilities are responsible for the prominence. For the same reason, iPhone users also use Google Maps and other online services more than most mobile device users. The BlackBerry is good at e-mail, but the Internet has other attractions.

What's more interesting is extrapolating from the trend. Certainly the iPhone's image quality doesn't hold a candle to even old point-and-shoots, much less new SLRs, but the phone taps straight into the social features of Flickr--the ability to photographically share with friends and family what's going on in your life, for example. There are innumerable expert photographers at Flickr, but it looks like the yet larger herd of ordinary snapshooters are going to leave them in the dust once liberated with the ability to post pictures at will.

I sent my iPhone photos to Flickr using the site's upload-by-e-mail service (see Yahoo's instructions), but there are several iPhone applications that will do it for you if you prefer. Apple's photo e-mailing software scales photos to 640x480, but I don't mind, given feeble image quality and the unlikelihood that these shots will ever make their way beyond a computer screen.

Until Apple blesses the iPhone with a camera worth talking about, you're just going to have to improve photos by transferring them to your desktop to edit.

Not so fast, slick. Picoli for iPhone ($4.99) is a handy little photo editor that does a great job touching up entire photos--you can color-correct images by using a slider, flip the image, and apply a few effects, including converting to sepia tones.

Watch our First Look video to see how Picoli works and see if you should download a copy for yourself.

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In a development that could be anywhere interesting, sleep-inducing or potentially even fictitious, Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy said Samsung is building a Java phone that will have better features and lower cost than Apple's iPhone.

Sun software chief Rich Green holds a Java FX Mobile-powered phone from FIC at the JavaOne conference in May.

(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

At least, that's what the Associated Press story about a report in the Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo.

Java is open-source software that at least in principle lets the same program run without having to be modified for different hardware. It's already widely used on mobile phones, including models from Samsung. What could make this story more interesting is if Samsung is embracing Sun's Java FX Mobile software, which Sun obtained through its acquisition of start-up SavaJe.

Typical phones today use the lightweight Java ME, stripped down for phones' anemic processing abilities, but Java FX Mobile is a variant of the desktop Java SE version. Adapting desktop software for increasingly powerful mobile devices is the strategy that Apple embraced with the iPhone and that Intel and Ubuntu sponsor Canonical are adopting with mobile Linux.

Of course, it all could amount to nothing, too, and given that whatever McNealy said likely was translated at least twice, that possibility shouldn't be ruled out. The AP quoted a Samsung spokeswoman Lee Soo-jeong as saying the two companies have talked but that "no decision has been made regarding co-development of the Java phone."

For its part, Sun wouldn't comment in detail on the situation. "Sun has a longstanding relationship with Samsung, working for years on Java-enabled phones and devices. Beyond that we have no comment about future plans and products," spokesman Russ Castronovo said.

Another star is coming into alignment in the mobile Linux galaxy: Firefox.

Mozilla has set up a group to develop the Firefox Web browser for mobile devices, hiring new staff and elevating the priority of the work to the same level as desktop computers. Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, announced the mobile Firefox move on his blog Tuesday evening.

"We are serious about bringing the Firefox experience and technology to mobile devices," he said. "Bringing Firefox add-ons, the Mozilla platform, open source, and a large and passionate community to the closed and fragmented mobile platform will do the world some serious good."

Schroepfer announced two new hires. One is Christian Sejersen, who recently led browsers at mobile browser developer Openwave, will be in charge of the mobile Firefox work and will set up a research-and-development center in Copenhagen, Denmark. In addition, Brad Lassey joined Mozilla from France Telecom's research-and-development group.

Mobile devices have become a "tier one platform set for Mozilla," he added. "This means we will make core platform decisions with mobile devices as first-class citizens."

Don't expect instant results, though. Mobile Firefox won't arrive until "later...certainly not before 2008." It will employ technology that will ship after Firefox 3, he added. That version isn't even in beta testing yet.

The work dovetails neatly with several other projects for open-source mobile devices. Canonical is working on a version of Ubuntu Linux for mobile devices, Intel trying to improve Linux for x86 chip-based mobile devices and includes Canonical as a partner in the effort, Nokia runs a project called Maemo for its Linux-based Internet tablets, and Google apparently has its own mobile Linux work under way.

While these efforts are marching in the same direction, if not necessarily in lockstep, it should be noted that mobile Linux efforts have been under way for years with little major success. One thing that's different this time is that Intel is working to bring the power of a fairly modern PC to small devices, potentially making software development easier.

Apple's iPhone has put an emphasis on full-fledged browsers on mobile devices instead of the limited-function ones that so far prevail in the market. "The user demand for a full browsing experience on mobile devices is clear. If you weren't sure about this before, you should be after the launch of the iPhone," Schroepfer said.

Apple's products use its own browser, Safari, but another option is Opera, which has had a long-standing mobile browsing effort, with products including Opera Mini and Opera Mobile.

But full browsers present hardware challenges for tiny devices. "Getting a no-compromise Web experience on devices requires significant memory (at least 64MB) as well as significant CPU horsepower," Schroepfer said.

The mobile Firefox project will replace another Mozilla effort, called Minimo, Schroepfer said. "While we don't currently plan to develop that project further, it has already provided us with valuable information about how Gecko (Firefox's page rendering engine) operates in mobile environments, has helped us reduce footprint, and has given us a platform for initial experimentation in user experience," Schroepfer said.