S60 Open to new features

Here's one for the photo people. Panoman is a camera applicaiton for S60 phones that, using photo stitching technology, lets you take 360-degree photos with your phone. I took an example with my Nokia E50 (which has a passable 1.3-megapixel camera, but nothing like what most of the Nseries devices offer), and the day was overcast, and I'm a rotten photographer and all that yadda yadda, but it's still interesting. If you want to see some really nice shots taken with Panoman, look here.

One of the best things about Panoman is how easy it is to use. You fire it up, hit the "Trigger" command, and it starts shooting the image. Rotate the phone slowly in a circle and you can see the picture being stitched together on the screen. Currently, you can select between high and low-res images, depending on how much memory is in your phone. It also has a gallery browser embedded, and you can send images through the application as well.

I don't know if it's my E50's camera, or if it's the limitations of a phone's bit-crunching computer ability, but even the high-res images turn out rather small. Having said that, I can think of a lot of places where a phone app like this would come in handy, not the least of which is apartment hunting: I remember the last time I went looking for a flat, having my phone camera was essential, but I still had to take shots of each room from every corner in order to stitch together in my memory a decent idea of the place. Panoman would be a shoe-in for that job.

360-pics tend to work better when you have quite a bit of open space around you. Movement doesn't photograph so well (check out the half-disappeared car in the shot I took) but on the other hand it creates a rather interesting effect. It's been a long time since I was impressed so much by a mobile camera app. I really hope they keep working on this one.

Find Panoman from the official site or download it from S60.com.