Sharing Photos on the LG CF360 (AT&T) Using HP Snapfish and Text Messaging

I have the old LG CF360 phone from AT&T, which has a 1.3 megapixel camera that also shoots video directly onto the phone memory as it does not take a memory card. The camera is no longer available from AT&T new, but can be purchased for free on a 2 year contract or for $229.99. You can also find these old phones online for as little as $89. As with all AT&T phones, you can remove the SIM card from a phone set up for the prepaid Go Phone service and place it inside of this phone, and receive that same service.

Taking a picture on the phone is a bit convoluted. The phone has an up, down, left right button and then two blank buttons one on each side of the up button. What you do is hit options with the button on the right hand side of the phone from the main screen, then hit 9 for pictures. Arrow over to the right one time and select the camera icon by hitting "ok", which is the "up" button on the phone. Press "ok" again to take a picture. But this is a way to dump photos off of the phone quickly without filling up the internal memory.

To send a picture, you have to go back to the main screen then back into the picture menu by pressing "options" then hitting 9 for pictures. Choose your picture and select "options" again. Hit the number 2 for the send option, then number 3 for the HP Snapshot application. This is where it gets interesting. You will receive a text message telling you that HP Snapshot received the picture. You can click on "view", or if you are in a different screen go into the main menu, then hit number 2 for messaging and go into the inbox.

Once in the inbox you will see a message from "service@snapfish.com". Open the message and they give you a really long URL to check out. Once you enter that long URL you can then register with Snapfish. If you uploaded more than one photograph, as I did, all of the photographs you forwarded will be there. Snapfish wants you to purchase photos, but you can share photos with a link, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger, Plaxo, Livespaces, Typepad or Wordpress for free. You can also send an email directly from the site.

The best part about all of this is that you aren't using your data plan to send the photos. Snapfish receives the photo as a picture text message. I checked my balance on the phone and again at the AT&T web site and I was charged the same $2 a day I always am for text and voice. The catch is that they charge for high resolution downloads. But I wanted to test it out to make sure that was not the only way you could get a high res download. So I clicked on "view larger" while checking out my image in Snapfish. Then I right clicked on the image to download it to the computer.

The quality was 800 x 600, but the resolution of the pictures I take on the camera is 1280 x 960. This is still a great service for those looking for data features without a data plan. Downloading a high resolution photo is 25 cents for the first photo, and 5 cents for each additional photo for a maximum of 50 photos per download. Even with that cost, this is still cheaper than a data plan. There are other ways to get photos out of this phone, as they offer Bluetooth, and there is an option to send photos through that method.