Alltel Makes Copying Mobile Photos Effortless

Alltel offers from now on a new exclusive service to its subscribers: PhotoCopter, which comes to take care of all the photos made with Alltel-branded mobile phones. Developed in collaboration with Ontela, PhotoCopter can instantly save every photo you make with your handset, both on your PC and on your favorite online photo albums. All you have to do is take the snapshot(s), because the image transfers are made automatically, without the need of pushing extra keys or entering the phone's menu.

For the moment, PhotoCopter only works with four Motorola phones: ROKR, V3m, V3a and V9m. The service costs $2.99 per month and allows you to transfer an unlimited number of images to your computer, email address or any of the following web albums: Photobucket, Snapfish, Flickr and Blogger.

Craig Kirkland, director of messaging and voice products at Alltel Wireless, declared: "Alltel realizes that our customers are capturing amazing memories on their camera phones, but until now, they have not had an easy way to transfer them to a PC for printing or sharing. PhotoCopter is a simple to use application that will allow our customers to get the most of their phone's camera and enjoy their photos in any setting."

"As camera phones become ever more critical, at the edge of the social network, the PhotoCopter service becomes an irreplaceable agent for the new generation of user created content," completed John Smelzer, SVP & GM Mobile, Fox Interactive Media.

In case you're wondering what does Fox Interactive Media have to do with Alltel's new service, this is the company that owns Photobucket, after acquiring it back in June 2007.

Ontela's CEO, Dan Shapiro, praised PhotoCopter by saying: "You just take the pictures and as if by magic, they appear on your computer in your 'My Pictures' folder. This is the end of the 'photo graveyard,' where people take pictures and then leave them on the phone until they're deleted. Instead, we've given a new life to these memories by saving them to the places users care about most."

PhotoCopter seems to be a quite handy service, especially for those who make lots of pictures with their phones and don't really have the time to transfer them from the handsets' memory. It would be nice if other major carriers around the world could come up with a service of this kind, especially if all the camera phone models would be supported.