Blogging’s a beautiful thing, letting anyone and everyone post their thoughts, news and media online for the world to see. But the best bloggers are the ones who get away from their monitors and out of the office, reporting on the ground from the latest events.
There’s the catch of course: how are you supposed to do that when laptop battery lives are so short, and you’re nowhere near a Wi-fi hotspot with a mains socket? You need a smartphone, and not just any old one. Think long and hard about your weblog’s style, if you’re an intensive video uploader or text heavy author. Or alternatively, read our guide to the best blogging phones out there. Much quicker.
Best for video bloggers
Sony Ericsson W595
Sony Ericsson’s brand new slide-out phone has made video sharing easier than Lionel Richie on a Sunday morning. Press record, shoot your movie, press stop, then press a button just one more time to upload your clip straight to Youtube. It’ll even allow landscape viewing with a tilt of the W595’s chassis, thanks to its accelerometer. It even sends out automated alerts to mates once the video is online.
You’ll need to get a Memory Stick Micro card to record any reasonable amount of video, as the phone only has 40MB of storage onboard, but since they come in sizes up to 8GB, you shouldn’t have any problems after that.
Best for Wordpress
Apple iPhone 3G
Wordpress is one of the most powerful, user friendly blog platforms out there, though that’s little solace if you’re trying to post on your phone’s 1-9 keypad and rubbish browser. Thankfully Apple has a solution in the iPhone, which offers applications for everything including your kitchen sink at the App Store.
Those benevolent folks at Wordpress have come up with an official version of the software for iPhone and iPod Touch and it’s mightily handy. Type away, manage your blog’s theme and even resize images on the bus, and because the iPhone shuns even a tiny qwerty keypad, writing is fluid and fast, provided your fingers aren’t too chubby.
Best for picture bloggers
Samsung i8510
This one’s a no brainer. Does your current phone have an eight megapixel sensor on board? We thought not. It’s not just raw shooting power that makes Samsung’s multimedia workhorse the best for photo bloggers however: the i8510 comes with ShoZu picture sharing software preinstalled, so you can upload your snaps right out of the box to just about anywhere, from Facebook to Flickr.
It’s a Symbian based smartphone, so you there’s stacks of third party software you’ll be able to use too, while HSDPA connectivity means you can share your shots quickly, no matter how high resolution they are – and of course with the i8510, they will be.
Best for audio recording
Nokia N95 8GB
Sure, the N96 is out now, but people are only just starting to work out how to hook an external microphone up to Nokia’s former leader of the gang, which is crucial for any journalists, interviewers or music bloggers out there. It’s not straight forward, and involves plugging several jacks together like an absurd daisy chain, but you can find instructions on how to hack one together here.
It hardly needs saying that once you’ve recorded your precious soundbites, you’ll be able to edit and polish it until it sparkles with the myriad of audio editing tools on offer for N-Series phones.
Best for Twitter
T-Mobile G1
It may not be out just yet, but if you’re a fan of the microblogging platform and missing SMS Twitters in the UK, you’ll definitely want to get your hands on the next best thing, HTC’s hottest new phone.
In case you’ve had your head buried in some sort of tech news desert, the T-Mobile G1 comes with Google’s hotly anticipated mobile open source OS, Android. Developers are already coding away for launch day, and one of the most exciting looking apps is Twitroid, a seamlessly integrated Twitter client that lets you post pictures as well as your standard 140 characters.
And when you take into account the T-Mobile G1’s combination of touchscreen and QWERTY keypad, everyone without a hook for a hand will be able to Tweet their followers quickly and easily.
