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Setting Things Up – Smartphone Functions 117
4.3 SETTING THINGS UP – SMARTPHONE
FUNCTIONS
4.3.1 INSTALL PLAYMEMORIES MOBILE
You can get this essential piece of software from the usual places: the App
Store for the iPhone, Google Play store for Android.
You can’t do much when you run the app by itself, but I encourage you to
do so just so you can change one setting. With the app running, hit the
MENU button or icon (it varies from phone to phone) and choose
“Settings”. The first option will be “Copy Image Size”. For a lot of
reasons I recommend ensuring this to 2M if it’s not there already – that will
mean your smartphone will receive an image of 1616 pixels wide x 1080
pixels high. Downloading the full-sized image just to post on Facebook is
really overkill. (Why is it called “2M”? Because the image is roughly 1.7
MP, and they just rounded up. The .jpg compressed version takes up only
about 500 KB though, making it ideal to send over your phone’s expensive
data plan.)
If you’re traveling in a foreign country and your roaming data plan is
something like $20/megabyte (it used to be that bad, and I’m sure it still is
in some countries), then you might want to consider using the VGA option
instead. VGA resolution is 640 x 480 pixels. (Which doesn’t sound like
much, but you didn’t complain about it much in the 1980’s when that was
the standard computer screen resolution.) The file size (when compressed
as a .jpg) will be approx. 75 kilobits – perfect if you want to conserve as
much of your data plan as possible and normal people won’t think it’s a
bad-looking image.
4.3.2 TRANSFERRING AN IMAGE TO YOUR SMARTPHONE
With PlayMemories Mobile running, you should see a screen that says
“Run the Wi-Fi Function on the shooting device.” The phone is now
looking specifically for a Wi-Fi enabled camera.
Now turn your camera on and play back an image you just took, and hit the
Fn button (or do MENU 1 Send to Smartphone) and then