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An easy cell for photos

Megan Hasquet, of Shelby, Mont., tries out the Teleprint service in downtown Spokane. Photo by Doug Dobbins (Photo by Doug Dobbins / The Spokesman-Review)
Doug Dobbins TXT correspondent
Megan Hasquet, of Shelby, Mont., tries out the Teleprint service in downtown Spokane. Photo by Doug Dobbins (Photo by Doug Dobbins / The Spokesman-Review)

Camera phones let us share our photos easily enough, using e-mail or messaging services.

What do you do if you want to have those photos now, to show others or put on your fridge?

A service called Teleprints (http://www.picta vision.com) gives people the option of printing cell camera photos in a flash, or in a little while anyway, depending how close you are to a Walgreens.

After the software is installed on your cell phone, you send images directly from camera phones to any one of 5,600 Walgreens stores nationwide to be printed within an hour for just $.19 for each 4-inch-by-6-inch photo.

Or you can have the photos printed by dotPhoto ( www.dotphoto.com) and delivered to you via US Mail in one to three business days.

Teleprints is compatible with an array of BREW, Java, and Symbian phones. Windows Mobile-based phones are not supported at this time.

Once you launch Teleprints on a cell phone, it guides you through an opening screen that informs you how many credits you have. Credits cost approximately $2, and that is how Teleprints makes money from the service.

You next choose the size and number of prints you want and select location of the Walgreens where you’ll get them or have them mailed to you.

The photos can also be mailed to friends too. If you choose to have the photos printed now, the Teleprints application takes you to a screen to enter your zip code or city or state to find the closest Walgreens. You could even send those pictures to a Walgreens near a friend, if you like.

That feature can be very helpful if you’re working with a friend who’s looking for houses in your area.

It would also be neat if Teleprints worked with camera phones that have GPS built into them; then it would give me driving directions to the Walgreens I need to find.

I showed the service to Mike and Kathy Golden, a couple from Medical Lake. I ran into them as they took their first pictures with their first camera phones in downtown Spokane. Both of them found the service useful and straightforward to use.

Camera phones are great for getting pictures we would have missed in the past. Pictures are memories and my memory can be poor at times.

Teleprints makes it easy to get prints and share them while the memories are fresh. If you are out on the road or don’t have the needed computer hardware to print quick snapshots for your family and friends, this is a simple way to have those photos printed.

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