Testing Out the Flickr App for Blackberry

Only a few weeks ago, I was lamenting on Twitter about the lack of a good flickr application for the Blackberry smartphone. I already have a mobile Facebook app with photo upload capabilities, so why not one for flickr? I knew that flickr would allow you to email in photos, but an app would be much quicker (or so I thought.) Needless to say, when I saw the news this weekend about the brand-new flickr app for Blackberry, I immediately went to download it (the link is here).

Since I read the news about the app via Google Reader on my phone’s mobile browser, I clicked through to download the app from the link provided in the blog post. But instead of downloading the application, I received this message instead:

Note

Microsoft® Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) users: if you encounter an error, look at the top of this page for a yellow bar that reads "This site might require the following ActiveX control: ‘AxLoader.cab’ from ‘Research In Motion’. Click here to install…" Click the yellow bar and choose "Install ActiveX Control…" to allow installation to proceed.

Apparently, there’s no over-the-air download available yet. However, when I returned to my PC and hooked up the phone via USB, the download worked just fine.

After signing in to the app with my Yahoo! ID, I went into the options and turned on a setting to “Enable Photosets.” The app then contacted flickr to retrieve a list of my current sets. After doing so, I was able to specify the particular photoset to add the picture to when doing an upload. The initial upload process seemed to take a long time for the first photo I tried – the message “Updating Account” stayed on the screen for nearly five minutes before I decided to hit “cancel.” I don’t know if it couldn’t process the upload due to the poor reception at my house or if there was some other problem. I have a couple of bars – enough to make phone calls and surf the web, but not a really strong signal.

A second attempt got a little further – the photo then showed up on the app’s main screen with a circle next to it to show that it was uploading. Unfortunately, that attempt ended with a red “X.” Finally, a third attempt worked – the photo made it to flickr and the red “X” changed to a blue checkmark instead. I’ll have to try this again from another location - hopefully, the app will work better when I’m in an area with a stronger signal, because this was a somewhat disappointing first run.