Cisco’s Flip cameras are known for making it easy to shoot and share video thanks to a simple user interface and a USB connector built right into the camera so you can plug it into a computer to copy files without any cables. Clearly there’s no way that an app can bring that particular feature to an iPhone or Android device. But Cisco has released a new FlipShare app for each platform that makes it pretty easy to browse your phone’s media library and share photos or videos via Facebook, Twitter, email, or groups.
I took the Android app for a spin, and I was impressed with how quickly it identified photos on my camera and sorted them by date. FlipShare managed to load images much more quickly than the Gallery 3D image viewer on my Google Nexus One.
In order to share an item, just tap the image then click the share icon in the upper right corner. FlipShare brings up links for Facebook, Twitter, and Facebook — although you’ll have to manually link your social networking accounts before you can send any photos or videos to your Facebook or Twitter contacts.
The app also lets you upload videos to YouTube.
To send media via email, all you have to do is grab an email address from your phone’s contact list. You can also create groups of contacts, adding multiple email addresses.
One thing worth noting though, is that when you share media with the app, you don’t actually end up sending the photo or video directly to your contacts or social networks. Instead, the photos and videos are uploaded to a FlipShare web site where users can view or share the file.
To be honest, the FlipShare app doesn’t offer any real sharing options that aren’t already built into the Android operating system, with the possible exception of easy access to groups. But if you’re already using Flip’s service to share videos from a Flip camera, I suppose the mobile app could come in handy. And the quick loading and well-organized media browser is a nice touch.
Unfortunately, the app crashed repeatedly during a 10 minute test on my Nexus One running Google Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Your results may vary.
FlipShare is available as a free download from the Android Market and from the iTunes App Store.
