Vizrea Helps Cellphone Swap Photos With PC, But It Has Drawbacks
The two most important digital devices people own, the personal computer and the cellphone, have a lot of trouble communicating. Unlike digital cameras or personal digital assistants, most cellphones aren't designed to easily transfer data to and from your PC.
The problem is especially nettlesome when it comes to photos. The computer is typically the principal repository for pictures, the place where they are organized, edited and printed. But, with their built-in cameras, cellphones are also becoming a key photo repository.
In most cases, the pictures on your phone never make it onto your computer, and vice versa. You wind up with two islands of digital photos. You can send the pictures on your phone to yourself or to others, but usually only one at a time, through clumsy, carrier-provided systems.
Now, some upstart companies are introducing software and services that help you transfer photos between PCs, cellphones and photo Web sites easily and automatically. Two of these products, Sharpcast and Vizrea Snap, are especially interesting.
I've been testing Vizrea for awhile, and it's available in a public trial version now. Sharpcast will do much of what Vizrea does, as well as synchronize your photos on multiple computers and multiple phones, but it won't be released until later this year, and it hasn't been available for testing. Neither program will work on most phones at first. Each company is starting out by targeting a limited number of cellphone models.
Despite some drawbacks, Vizrea is very cool. It allows you to see all the pictures stored on your computer on the screen of a cellphone, even if the two devices are 2,000 miles apart. So if you're visiting relatives in Providence, R.I., but the pictures of your home renovation are back on your PC in Denver, you can still show them off on a Vizrea-equipped phone.
In addition, if you take a picture with a Vizrea-equipped phone while you're in Providence, the service will transmit it to your PC in Denver or post it to your personal page on the Vizrea Web site. You don't have to go through any menus; it just happens. Finally, you can share your Vizrea-managed photos with friends, and vice versa.
While Vizrea is primarily a photo service, it can also handle video clips and certain audio files. It also allows you to enter text postings on your personal Web page.
Vizrea, which is free for now, consists of three parts: a software application for your Windows computer, a software application for your phone, and a Web site for viewing and sharing pictures. You can get the software and see the Web element at vizrea.com.
The Vizrea PC program is a complete photo organizer and even includes basic editing functions. You can create virtual albums, or "collections" of your photos, that can be viewed on a phone or can receive photos from a phone. The program automatically captures all the stuff in your Windows My Pictures folder, so it becomes accessible to your phone.
These collections can also be shared with your personal page on Vizrea's Web site so that any photos you add to the collections are copied to the Web page automatically.
On the cellphone, Vizrea's software is much simpler. It offers three main choices: My Content, Upload Content and Friends' Content. The top option, My Content, is the most important. It allows you to choose either your PC or your Vizrea Web page as a source, and then to see thumbnails of the photos stored there and then view a particular photo.
Vizrea Snap is also available as an integrated feature in a popular Nokia photo program for phones called Nokia Album.
In my tests, Vizrea worked pretty well in both directions. I was able to create collections on a ThinkPad laptop, and view them on a Nokia cellphone. I took pictures with the phone, and a few minutes later they were on the PC or on my page on the Vizrea Web site. I shared my collections with friends and was able to see their pictures as well, on both the phone and the PC.
But Vizrea has one huge drawback: It works only on certain phones that use a Nokia operating system called Series 60. Most of these are Nokia models, but only a couple of them are easily available in the U.S. -- the 6682 and the N90. There are many others, but they are primarily sold in Europe.
There are also smaller drawbacks. If the cellphone signal isn't strong, downloading the photos from the computer to the phone can be a slow process. Vizrea doesn't save, or cache, information for long, so almost every time you want to access your PC from your phone, it needs to download the folder structure and thumbnails, as if it had never done so before.
And I had problems with a cool feature in the Nokia Album version of Vizrea that allows the phone to automatically identify pictures by location. It didn't work every time, though Vizrea says it is working on a fix.
Still, Vizrea is a hopeful sign. If it can link the photos on cellphones and PCs, it should soon be possible to seamlessly synchronize other kinds of data -- contact entries, email and more. Then your two most important devices could really work as one.
实现手机和电脑间图片传输的软件
目前人们拥有的最重要的两样数码设备就是个人电脑和手机，但这两者之间的数据交换却十分困难。和数码相机及个人数码助理(PDA)不同，手机不能像它们那样可以方便地从个人电脑上存取数据。
说到图片，这个问题就尤其烦人。电脑传统上是储存图片的主要载体，人们在电脑上整理、编辑和列印图片。但随著内置相机的出现，手机也正在成为一个重要的图片存储场所。
大多数情况下，手机上的图片无法传到电脑上，电脑上的图片也传不到手机上。结果，两个图片库就像两个孤立的小岛。你可以把手机的图片发到自己的邮箱或发给其他人，但一般每次只能发一张，且要借助于电信运营商那些笨拙的系统。
眼下，有些异军突起的公司正在引入一些软件和服务来帮助用户在电脑、手机和图片网站之间简单地自动传输图片。这其中的两项产品--Sharpcast和Vizrea Snap特别值得注意。
我测试了Vizrea一段时间，它目前已经有公测版本。Sharpcast能完成Vizrea的很多功能，还能在多台电脑和手机上实现同步，但它要到今年底才发布，现在还不能测试。刚推出的时候，这两款软件在大多数手机上都无法使用，因为两家公司最初只锁定了有限的几个手机型号。
虽然存在一些缺陷，但Vizrea真的很酷。它使你能在手机萤幕上看到存在电脑上的所有图片，即使两个设备之间相隔2000英里。假如你正在罗德岛州的普罗维登斯(Providence)拜访亲戚，而你家装的照片远在丹佛家中的电脑上，如果你的手机配有Vizrea，你仍然可以把图片拿出来炫耀一番。
此外，如果你在普罗维登斯用配有Vizrea的手机拍了一张照片，Vizrea就能把照片传到在丹佛的电脑上，或者传到你在Vizrea网站的个人网页上。整个过程中你不需要操作任何菜单，它自然就完成了。你还可以跟朋友分享用Vizrea管理的图片，你的朋友同样也能跟你分享。
虽然Vizrea主要上是一种图片服务，但它也能管理视频文件和某些音频文件。它还允许你在个人网页上输入文本留言。
Vizrea目前是免费的，包括三个部分：一个安装在Windows电脑上的软件应用程序，一个安装在手机上的软件应用程式，还有一个可以流览和分享图片的网站。你可以在vizrea.com上获得这些软件，并看到它的图片网站。
Vizrea的电脑程序就是一个完整的图片管理器，甚至还包含一些基本的编辑功能。你可以创建虚拟相册，或是自己的图片“集”，它们能在手机上看到，也能从一部手机上接收图片。这个程序能自动捕捉你存在Windows下“我的图片”文件夹中的所有东西，这样你的手机就能看到这些图片了。
你在Vizrea上的个人网页也能分享这些图片集，于是你增加到图片集里的任何图片都被自动拷贝到网页上。
手机上的Vizrea软件要简单得多。它主要有三个选项：“我的内容”，“上传内容”以及“朋友的内容”。最顶端的选项--“我的内容”是最重要的，你可以选择电脑或Vizrea网页作为图片的来源，然后你会看到存放在这些地方的图片的缩略图并看到某张照片的大图。
Vizrea Snap也可以被整合进诺基亚很受欢迎的手机图片程序--Nokia Album中。
在我的测试中，Vizrea在两个传输方向上都表现得很出色。我能在一台ThinkPad笔记本上创建图片集，并在一部Nokia手机上浏览到这些图片。我用手机拍了些照片，几分钟后它们就出现在电脑或我在Vizrea网站的个人网页上。我同时能在手机和电脑上与朋友们分享我的图片集，我也能观赏到他们的图片，
不过，Vizrea有一个巨大的缺陷：它只适用于某些使用诺基亚Series 60操作系统的手机。这些手机大多数都是诺基亚手机，而在美国市场上容易找到的只有两个型号--6682和N90。此外还有很多其他型号的手机，但主要在欧洲出售。
另外它还有一些小缺点。如果手机的信号不是很强，从电脑下载图片到手机上将是一个漫长的过程。Vizrea不能长时间保存资讯，因此几乎每次你想把手机联到电脑上时，都需要再次下载文件夹的结构和缩略图，就像以前没有下载过一样。
整合了Vizrea的Nokia Album版本有一个很酷的功能，即手机能根据地点来自动辨别图片。我在测试这个功能时遇到了障碍，不是每次都能正常工作，然而Vizrea公司称其性能很稳定。
不管怎么说，Vizrea软件的前景十分广阔。既然它能把手机和电脑上的图片联起来，那么不用多久其他种类的资料也能完美实现同步，如联系方式、电子邮件等。到那时，你的两个最重要的数码设备使用起来就真的像一台设备那样方便了。
