I’ve really been enjoying tweeting as of late but I’ve come to realize that 140 characters isn’t good for getting quality thoughts out for the handful of people that might read this.

Btw here is a pic of emily cause she’s the greatest kid alive. Bar none!

So you got a fancy smartphone and while you really enjoy the device as  a phone the qwerty keyboard for SMS messaging and email ypu really are only skinning the surface of what you could be doing with this great piece of technology that just sits in your pocket.

No matter what device you have, be it an iPhone or a blackberry, a treo or a windows mobile device you can have a great deal more fun with your phone than just talking texting and getting the weather. Since I’ve been using a smartphone for some capacity I thought I would tell people how I’ve been using my device for the last 4 years some of it specific to actual hardware but generally you can accomplish most if not all of the stuff I’ve done with any smartphone.

This all really relies on the fact that you have a data plan with your phone without a data plan you might as well to pick up a pay as you go phone and just get talk and text. The real nice thing about a smartphone is that it’s got the data. I’ll breakdown different general applications or uses into sections and speak to devices I know.

Photos
If your phone is equipped with a camera chances are that you’ve been taking pictures already. Maybe you’ve been sending them to friends via mms or maybe you’ve been using them as desktops for your phone. Better yet why not share them right away with your friends via some of the more popular sites that allow for mobile uploads ?

Flickr
Did you know that Flickr serves up somewhere close to 35 million photos a minute? That’s slot of photos why no get in on the action and sign up for a Flickr account? First off it’s free secondly if you have rogers Internet at home then you can use your rogers/yahoo email account and get a free Flickr pro account which means you save 24$ a year an get all the perks of the Flickr pro account.

Once your set up you’ll want to configure your account to accept mobile uploads once you do that you can add the special email address to your contact list and then the next time you take a picture when your out and about you can send that photo directly to Flickr when it  happens instead of leaving it on your phone only to get lots and forgotten in the shuffle better yet you can have Flickr auto tag all your incoming photos from your mobile device.

Facebook
Why not post photos to your Facebook profile for all to see. It’s really simple just set up your profile to accept mobile uploads. On your computer if you go to your faceboook home page > hit settings,  > then at the setting screen click the mobile tab, > you can then add your phone number to use the sms features of facebook or head over to the facebook mobile page https://register.new.facebook.com/mobile/ and set up your phone from there. You can then start emailing your pics to mobile@facebook.com as long as your emails come from your same email you’ve registered with Facebook you should be providing all your friends with great pictures via your smartphone.

Staying connected.
I personally stay connected via a few of the social sites out there, mostly via twitter and facebook and by posting to my own blog via an iphone app that helps me out. I’m in a slightly different boat since the iphone has an abundance of apps available in addition to the ones that ship with the phone, I’m finding that I’m doing more with this phone than I ever did with my treo, wether thats a good thing or not remains to be debated, I sure am having fun tho.

While I’ll cover things that have to do specifically with the iphone most of the following will rely on the fact that you have an internet enabled device, obviously you’ll need to have a dataplan but you probably already know that. Did you know that there is an abundance of mobile versions of sites  out there for smartphone? Sure the iPhone has great web rendering and windows mobile devices do a somewhat decent job rendering popular  sites. Blackberries have it the worst when it comes to rendering web pages. But what about sites that are specifically designed for mobile screens. Sites that are stripped down and light weight for over the air use. There are a bunch and more pop up all the time. Let’s check a few out of the more popular destinations online.

MSN/hotmail/live
iphones can by default get hotmail delivered via the mail app tho this shouldn’t stop you from using the mobile version of hotmail.

Ever try and get hotmail via a web browser on your phone? Its painful, yet most people don’t know that Microsoft has a mobile portal for their mobile users hit up http://mobile.live.com and you are greeted with a simple menu of the MSN offerings made specifically for your scaled down screen size. from here you can access mobile versions of all the MSN properties like hotmail, messenger, and MSN (news, sports, more) if you use hotmail or any other MSN properties you should be using this site as a starting point.

Google
I think you’ll start to notice a theme from here on out. Google has a mobile homepage as well similar to MSN its a stripped down version of google made for small screens. http://m.google.com takes you there from here you have access to the whole google lineup of apps.

Everything from search to maps and gmail. plus if you use other google things like calender and docs you can get there too. the best part is that all of these services have been designed to work well on your mobile device, even simple things like search has been refined. Google also has the google app for the iphone which lets you get to all of the google products. As well you can set up your mail app to handle gmail accounts.

Facebook
While I’m personally spoiled with a neat little facebook app for my iphone there is an alternative for people on other smartphones. Its important to note that Blackberry also has a facebook app that you can get by going to http://www.facebook.com on your BB the page should prompt you to download and install the app, there is a catch however. If your BB is given to you by a company they may (and more and more IT departments are doing this) not allow you to download 3rd party applications to your device.

Have no fear since facebook has a mobile version of their site… I used it pre-iphone days and its a snap. go to http://m.facebook.com and login like normal (see the re-occurance of the m. in the URL) here is a simple version of facebook that lets you send messages and change your status, and even upload photos via either MMS or email. you’ll have to set those things up on a computer however, like I stated above.

Flickr
thats right… you guessed it http://m.flickr.com is where you can sign in to check out the mobile version of flickr. Check on the recent activity of your photos or check out pics by searching…. fun.

Yahoo!
Since flickr is owned by yahoo it totally makes sense that http://m.yahoo.com is the mobile version of yahoo. similar to that of the mobile msn yahoo lets you check mail and messenger as well as the rest of the yahoo offering, if your down with yahoo then this place is for you. its also good to mention that their mobile site on an iphone is quite different from the mobile version other devices will see.

Twitter
Spoiled am I with multiple twitter clients on my iphone like twitterific and twinkle other devices can get their tweets on with http://m.twitter.com. Twitter was best summarized to me by a friend who likened it to updating your status on facebook, which is prolly my most used portion of facebook. Your tweets are reduced to 140 characters maximum and you can follow friends and receive their updates in your twitter stream, you can reply and have micro conversations.

Twitter began by the notion of asking you a simple question in “what are you doing” and has exploded from there. you can reach me and follow my own tweets at twitter.com/regalbear/ You can also access twitter via sms.

Myspace
Are you still kicking it oldschool and refuse to let your myspace account die. You can check your myspace by rocking http://m.myspace.com in your mobile browser. Or for those with the jesus phone you’ll have the myspace app.

digg
http://m.digg.com takes you to the mobile version of digg.com the popular social news website. Great for killing time on a commute to keep up with whats going on.

cbc
http://m.cbc.ca will redirect you to a super simple cbc site with canadian news and other happenings.

You see that there are quite a lot of different mobile versions of sites for mobile devices, and while it only takes experimenting with some clever URL configurations to yield the sites out there. Most of these I found on my own knowing that they might or might not exist, its clever what a little m. can do in-front of a URL and even more clever that you can do much more on your internet enabled phone than just use the built in weather app or the GPS. What you really want to do is start exploring other things that you normally do on a computer at home or at work and extend those to your mobile device.

Conclusion

Myself I pretty much only twitter on my iphone and read an enormous amount of news on my phone via digg. I post photos to my flickr account, mostly of my sleeping kid or of XM songs that appear on the radio while the kid sleeps. If anything its fun and its engaging and lets me communicate to the people in all my social communities that I openly contribute to. Is this kind of mobile connection necessary for me? Probably not but I’m enjoying the fact that I can be this connected in this day and age even if I’m physically alone. People with smartphone need to start using them as smartphones not just as phones with keyboards for easy text entry, with the prices of handsets dropping, data-plans becoming reasonable to most people and mobile taking off in strides online people need to get with the times and really explore all that these devices have to offer. Its only then that true progress is made when it comes to hardware. Sure there are the Apples and the Googles of the world that are constantly pushing the envelope, but if the public doesn’t realize that these devices are truly great then its all for not.

Do you have a favorite site that you use on your mobile/smartphone/device? Let me know I’m always looking for better sites or great iphone apps that let me do neat stuff with my phone. Please leave them in the comments. Cheers