Picture services aim to help ease-of-use problems

Sprint announced it will launch this spring Picture Mail groups, a service that allows subscribers to create an online community about any subject and invite friends with an email address or Sprint phone to add pictures, video clips and text of their own at no additional cost. And Seattle-based Vizrea has introduced the Vizrea Snap service, which can automatically move pictures between a phone, PC and the Web.

These services might help push the camera-phone market along. In-Stat has said that only a tiny percentage of camera phones are used regularly to transmit pictures or to store for later use. Less than a third of camera phone owners surveyed by In-Stat indicated that they share picture messages with friends. One of the reasons was that they were turned off by the difficulty of creating and sending pictures.

For more information about Sprint's Picture Mail groups and Vizrea:
- check out Sprint's press release
- read this story from USA Today