It seems so obvious, I don’t why it didn’t occur to me before – my phone can take video and it has a bluetooth connection (which I use all the time for transferring photos to my PC), thus making it the perfect portable webcam device.

Mobiola is a piece of software which lets you use these features of your Symbian phone to good effect. It’s free for a 30-day trial, during which connections are limited to 5-minute bursts, and thereafter it’s $20 for life, which isn’t bad I suppose, but I always feel slightly cheated having to pay for mobile software which probably isn’t going to last me very long (due to the neverending upgrade cycle) and probably only does 70% of what I’d like it to do.

The same applies to Mobiola – whilst it’s a cool application of the phone’s features, the app isn’t really good enough to pay for, mainly because the video quality is so low. This is obviously because the PC part of the software updates the view from the webcam in real-time and there’s a bandwidth cap on how much data the phone can transfer to make these feasible.

What I’d really like to see is the option for a higher quality of video, buffered and maybe saved to the PC for viewing later, rather than displayed in real-time. Also, it doesn’t allow you to zoom like the built-in video recorder does, which was the first thing I tried to do, so that would be nice. Still, it’s a great example of the flexibility of these devices.

(thanks to kokeshi for pointing this out)