Running as Root

Although I've known for some time that the Sprint picture mail functionality was crippled to near uselessness, I didn't quite realize the full extent of the problem until today. I have a simple need. I'd like to email a picture taken with my crappy little VGA (640×480) picture phone to Flickr with the subject line and body intact. I emphasize the subject/body thing because Flickr will use these as the photo name and description respectively. Well, there's the first problem. Sprint doesn't exactly email the picture to the address you specify as expected. The recipient gets an email with the subject "A Picture Share!" and a bunch of quasi Sprint-spam in the body along with a low resolution version of your picture (250×250 with white space–probably really 250×187.5). In addition, you cannot send the picture with a subject/body–just an impotent little "message." That message gets stuck in the body of the email in a nice non-standard way.

Although there used to be a utility over at hoho.com to rotate the images and extract the higher resolution version from the site, it seems it no longer works. Sprint has a habit of not only not exposing any sort of API, but of routinely changing the way their stuff works. I know this from experience in trying to maintain auction monitoring programs to send text messages to my Sprint phone through their crippled SMS web site. I digress. Well, surely if you just view the image on the site you're taken to from the email, you'll get the "high" resolution photo? Not so much. That version gets a border added to it and achieves the whopping resolution of 296×224. Still a far cry from the 640×480 my phone is capable of. How do you get the full resolution? You click the download link on the page your taken to after receiving the email. This will download a zip file (because JPGs are sooooooo compressible) containing your picture (with a "jpeg" extension). Simply unzip it and enjoy the full, eye-popping joy of it all.

Now, why the hell can't Sprint keep their propaganda to themselves and either send the real picture as an attachment or at the very least publish an API that would allow people to write tools to do the same? I'm sure there's some fucked up reason it makes good business sense to frustrate your customers with retarded functionality while spamming their contacts with crap about your services (which your own fucking customers don't even like). Here's to good business. Ass.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28th, 2005 at 12:42 am and is filed under Entertainment, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.