iSmashPhone

Google Maps, Schmoogle Maps: It's Open Street Map for GPS Mission

Orbster's GPS Mission is a web- and smartphone-based map game that's now being offered as a free iPhone app.  Brags the makers:

"This multiplayer scavenger hunt game will take you to the most interesting places around -- for free.  Explore your world in a completely new and playful way using your GPS-enabled phone.  Enter the community to show where you've been and what missions you've solved.  Create your own missions and challenge other players!"

Even more significant, the coders have opted to use the Open Street Map project, rather than the better-known Google Maps, as OSM is not only user-supported (and thereby more readily updated), but also has better coverage in such atypical locales as Eastern Europe, South Africa and Australia, as well as a greater selection of footpaths for non-automotive navigation.

[Available from iTunes]

iPhone Picture Uploads to Flickr On The Rise

The tight integration between the iPhone and Flickr is turning into a match made in heaven.

As you can see from the above graph, over the past twelve months the number of iPhone-based image uploads to Yahoo's picture-sharing site have steadily shot upwards, to the point where it appears to be challenging established digital SLR's from industry leaders Nikon and Canon.

However, this should all be taken with the proverbial football-sized grain of salt.  Flickr measures popularity on the basis of the number of users who've uploaded a photo on a given day. In other words, the camera used by a person who uploads one photo a day will fare better than one who uploads 100 pictures one day a month. Second, many camera phones don't identify themselves to Flickr, so their use isn't logged. Last, these statistics fluctuate daily, and who knows what kind of anomalous behavior is going on during the holidays.

More statistics: The total number of photos uploaded from the Rebel XTi is about 51 million, compared with 5.8 million for the iPhone. However, there are nearly 3,000 people uploading daily from their iPhone compared with about 6,500 for the XTi.

One thing the iPhone has in its favor -- as opposed to both DSLR's and other smart handsets -- is the ease with which the iPhone handles network-based apps that more business-only-oriented phones like the Blackberry struggle with.  And this dovetails perfectly with Flickr's social-networking aspect of visually documenting your life in almost real time. 

Obviously, the photo-taking capabilities of the iPhone pale in comparison to even an entry-level DSLR, but amateur shutterbugs have always outnumbered professional photographers.

[Via Cnet]