I... I just don't get it. So you can send 30 "full quality" photos at once? Is there anyone who's really thinking, "you know what I need right now? The ability to send my friends higher resolution photos in parallel!"
I can already MMS high res photos to groups at a time. I can already upload high res photos to Facebook, email them out at very high res, and transfer them to my computer at original quality. The bandwidth limits in their plan levels are silly considering they're all way over my 3G bandwidth cap and I can already send original quality photos over wifi.
I hope that this is just a first iteration and we'll be seeing further products and services from these guys soon.
Having taken a small spin of the app, I'm inclined to agree. A few things I noticed:
- Locational services permission required. They inform you that it's not to track your location, but to track the location of the photos you send so that information can be included.
- Unable to preview photos I'm queueing up for sending. When you're selecting photos to send, you're shown the grid view for whatever photo collection you have, and tap on ones you wish to send - but there's no obvious option to view the photo in a full view for the purpose of making sure I'm sending the right one.
Like you say there are already a wealth of photo sharing options that don't create another layer of abstraction, at least in my limited usage and experience. IMO the ability to share multiple photos doesn't warrant a separate app but a service that photo sharing applications should provide given the demand.
One thing that you can't do right now is send original quality videos. This could be useful for uploading large videos, but it seems KickSend still tries (like every other app out there) to compress the video which takes FOREVER and kills your battery if you have a 10 minute long video.
"Previously, you’d have to queue up each one individually. Now, you can send up to 30 photos at a time in full quality, again over 3G or WiFi."
What is "previously" and what does "at once" mean?
The bandwidth available over the period of the transfer gives you a fixed amount of data that can be transfered, regardless of what and how you transfer it. If it's 30 pictures one after the other or all "at once", you'll still need the same time to get all your pictures uploaded.
So what is the big thing here? Do they use some magic trick to optimize the bandwidth available?
The lack of details on that and sentences like "couple that powerful photo transfer ability with the fact that you can send any type of file to anyone and you’ll better understand why Kicksend has caught our attention" (don't we have dozens of ways to send any kind of file to anyone?) gave me the feeling that this was just pushing the product on basis other than its real merits…
So I found this blog post http://blog.kicksend.com/weve-enabled-file-sharing-on-your-i... and it seems that they consider "previously" to mean "sending photos through email" which is apparently limited to 4 at a time. I wouldn't know though because I've never considered trying to bulk send photos in email before.
Either they created more bandwidth where there is none or this is really an announcement how their app can now do uploads in parallel. Woohoo! You finished the tutorial level, you may continue.
I can already MMS high res photos to groups at a time. I can already upload high res photos to Facebook, email them out at very high res, and transfer them to my computer at original quality. The bandwidth limits in their plan levels are silly considering they're all way over my 3G bandwidth cap and I can already send original quality photos over wifi.
I hope that this is just a first iteration and we'll be seeing further products and services from these guys soon.