Comments on: Testing my kit for mobile reporting in Africa

By: Onnik Krikorian

Onnik Krikorian — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:08:38 +0000

Safdar, what is the custom Mobile Reporting software? Would be interesting to lear more.

By: Safdar Mustafa

Safdar Mustafa — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 07:07:32 +0000

Really enjoyed reading your post, Guy.
From working in the mobile media team at AlJazeera Channel I can really related to your experiences. A while back we equipped some of our Reporters with N95 mobiles on their desert trip to Mali and Niger, what they came back with was quite interesting.
Following that we decided to purchase around 60 N82 handsets for our field reporters and load them up with custom Mobile Reporting software.
Are you planning to attend the mobile event in Jordan http://everybodytexts.eventbrite.com by any chance?
Would be great to meet and share ideas 🙂

By: Guy Degen

Guy Degen — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:45:24 +0000

Marc, thanks for the feedback.
I had no problems with Twitter in Tanzania via Vodacom last December.
I think some of the sales models used in Africa are quite innovative to get more people using mobile phones.
Compare that to Costa Rica where up until late January it was not possible to buy a pre-paid mobile card from the government telco ICE.
It would be great to see Twitter offer more local numbers to SMS instead of the UK mobile number. I only noticed that Twitter now offers a local German mobile number when I was changing settings for my Nigeria trip.
A couple of Nigerian journalists I met were also exploring the new NaijaPulse network http://www.naijapulse.com – though you can only send/receive messages on a mobile phone with email – SMS is not yet available.
From a glance, your organisation I’m sure would be well placed to draw upon local knowledge of social media friendly mobile networks in many regions. It would be a good experiment. Please do keep us updated.

By: Marc Maxson

Marc Maxson — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:02:28 +0000

Great and useful info. Last month (March 09) I criss-crossed Kenya testing similar options. Internet was down country wide for days at a time but twitter by SMS still worked! That made me a twitter convert, as we work with over a hundred organization in Kenya (GlobalGiving.org) and most cannot access Internet reliably.
Unfortunately, people in Sierra Leone have not been able to get twitter-SMS to work. Anyone else notice West African networks that don’t even allow sending by twitter? REceiving twitter messages to phone is still not available except in 20 rich countries.
Also found tumblr to be useful when Internet was up as a low bandwidth simple interface for updating several blogs.
If no one else sets up a blog to track this (which features work where) then GlobalGiving will be putting one up to help our orgs in 100+ countries know what will work.

By: Graham Holliday

Graham Holliday — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:59:51 +0000

Great post Guy – very interesting to hear what does and does not work int he field. I found in France Audioboo was slow uploading to the Edge network and so may be troublesome on a Kano connection. I hadn’t come across the Tumblr uploader, thanks for the tip although it didn’t work…
As for phones Onnik, the iPhone is brilliant as an internet connection device across all media. It’s crap as a phone and crapper as a camera.
I’ve always found the Sony Ericcson phones to have very good cameras. I think they use Carl Zeiss lenses. I used to use them a lot in Vietnam to take blog pictures and shoot films – you can get up to ten mins or so on them – http://bit.ly/tAJgD – I’m sure the Sony lenses are even better these days.
There’s an interesting way of judging mobile phone camera quality on Flickr. Search for the phone you’re interested in and click through to see the image quality users have got out of it,
http://www.flickr.com/cameras/
I imagine Apple will up the camera game, they couldn’t exactly down it…

By: Guy Degen

Guy Degen — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:11:44 +0000

I think Burjanadze and Nogaideli are wondering if anything will happen too! I'm working on a UN filming assignment over next week in Tbilisi - just a co-incidence that I'll be down there at the same time. BTW not sure if Apple will beef up the camera quality of the iPhone in the future, but have a look at http://www.kirkmastin.com - http://www.kirkmastin.blogspot.com/ he's quite a fan of what the iPhone camera can do. I like his attitude to using it.

By: Onnik Krikorian

Onnik Krikorian — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 11:33:44 +0000

Ah, for the opposition protest? Wasn’t planning to be. Have a presentation to give for IREX on the role of blogs during the post-election state of emergency in Armenia last year. BTW: Are you expecting that anything will happen?
Anyways, thanks for the comments on the N82. Yeah, the iPhone looks wonderful, but can’t say I’m impressed with the camera samples I’ve seen. Looks great to play with, but the camera isn’t what I was hoping for.

By: Guy Degen

Guy Degen — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 11:18:33 +0000

Onnik, I’m really happy with the 5mp quality of the camera on the N82. I’ve had it since last July.
It means that I’ve always got a reasonable camera in my pocket. The flash is not bad, but I rarely use it.
Yes, I gaze at the iPhone with envy, but for now I’m sticking with the N82.
The big drawback of the N82 is the tiny keypad. I haven’t tried using the fold up keyboard that’s available.
I’ll be in Tbilisi next week – are you around?
G

By: Onnik Krikorian

Onnik Krikorian — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 11:05:47 +0000

Thanks for this post, especially as it comes at a very appropriate time. My mobile just died and I’ve been looking at getting a new one, but as a photographer, I want a good camera phone. Obviously, I know that mobiles are not as good as even compact digital cameras so megapixels are not important to me.
However, finding the best at a reasonable price is. So, I discovered the N82 on a few sites yesterday and the samples look great for a phone. However, if you had the choice, would you say there are better? Touch screens and fancy icons are not important to me. Camera quality and the ability to send photos and updates to twitter etc are.