Shozu site cuts cost of mobile picture posting

A free service called Shozu can clip a third or more off the cost of sending pictures from a high-resolution phone camera, the company says.

The standard way of sending a picture from your mobile using MMS, the multimedia version SMS texting, costs around 35p and the resolution is likely to be reduced to far less than that of the camera in your phone.

Alternatively you can send it in full resolution as an email attachment, but transferring a 2megapixel picture can be costly and slow, and you can't answer or make calls at the same time.

Shozu provides a software client that sends the file more efficiently and therefore more cheaply than email, says chief executive Mark Bole.

It does so in the background and automatically suspends the transfer if you receive or make a call. The service has been sold to mobile operators and handset makers but it is now available to individual users.

Shozu will automatically post pictures to online sharing sites like Yahoo's Flickr, Webshots and Text America. You can even add captions, either at the same time or later on.

Other sharing sites can be used but Shozu will not necessarily be able to support extra features such as hit counts. In the pipeline is the ability to upload automatically to your own site.

Once the picture has been posted, you can get Shozu to send it as an attachment to any number of emails at no cost.

'You might, depending on how you operator charges, have to pay to send the same picture several times over using MMS or standard email,' Bole said.

Shozu supports Symbian, Microsoft Mobile, UIQ and Java-based handsets.