Sharpcast Beta

Among the many available photo-sharing services, Sharpcast enters late in the game but with a feature the competition lacks: It offers real-time photo sharing, backup, and instant access across PCs and even mobile devices.
 
A downloadable desktop app lets you drag and drop photos from your PC into the service, and the client software automatically backs the images up to the Web account in real time. In fact, the photos also appear almost instantly on any PC (even mobile) on which you are running the client software.
 
Even when you are offline you can add images to the client window and sync them to the Web service as soon as you are connected. This process worked seamlessly; it was as if the PC client was tied to the Web account, because images seemed to sync almost simultaneously. Naturally, Sharpcast shares these photos or albums and slideshows with your contacts.
 
The real value of Sharpcast is its mobile functionality. We tested an alpha version of the Windows Mobile client on a Treo 700w (Brew and Java clients that will work on most phones are expected in the first half of 2007). Sharpcast Mobile works precisely like the desktop and Web iterations. It shows thumbnails of your current photo collections, and you can even watch the service adding thumbnails as you upload new images from your desktop PC. We could zoom, run slideshows, and add photos to our collection directly from our Treo. Oddly, you cannot share albums with others from the mobile client, which seems to be a glaring oversight.
 
Although still in beta, Sharpcast is very promising both as a photo service that is always in sync with all of your PCs and mobile devices and as a backup solution for your growing digital-photo library.