uQool Flash, is this an April fool come early, or just a hoax?
Saturday, March 6, 2010 at 12:39PM | Glyn Evans I held off posting news on the release of an app called uQool Flash, as the AppStore description sounded to good to be true (see description below), and more like an April fools joke come early.
Description from the AppStore: We have developed an patent pending camera flash system for mobile devices. With this system, taking high quality photos in the dark becomes reality, not only for mobile devices lacking a flash, such as iPhone, but also for those mobile devices with weak flash. Our flash triggering system (patent pending) ensures perfect synchronization between camera image acquisition and flash firing.
There are two parts of our camera flash system : a USB stick sized flash hardware and software running on mobile devices. The USB stick sized flash unit has built-in battery and it can be charged via USB port.
This application, uQool Flash for iPhone, is the software part of our mobile camera flash system. Without our flash hardware unit, this application is nothing more than an photo capturing utility. The power lies in the combination of our software and hardware.
I was intrigued by the app description, and the promise of a small flash device, but could find no evidence of such a flash device. The website pointed to a holding page, and when I contacted the person registered against this domain, I got the following sarcastic reply.
"www.uqool.com resolves to an IP address, and that IP address is in a range that has my name listed as the technical contact. Contacting me about the content of that web site is somewhat similar to me calling up BT and asking them about the iPhoneography Blog.
So, No, I cannot help. Well, maybe I can: I'll be cheering for England to win the World Cup in South Africa."
The app was released on the 1st March, and every day since I have checked to see if this hardware flash device would materialise, but today when I checked the app, all I got was "Your request could not be completed", and so it would now appear the app itself has been removed from the AppStore, so was this an April fools joke gone wrong? a hoax? or is there really a 3rd part hardware flash coming to the iPhone? If anyone knows anymore about this app or flash device itself, then please let us know.
uQool Flash
Reader Comments (4)
It would be great to have a real flash for the iPhone! Unfortunately, I think the rolling shutter would prevent such a product from materializing. Since the pixels are recorded at different times, the duration of the flash would have to be quite long to evenly illuminate the scene. I guess this is why many mobile phone cameras actually use little LED illuminators instead of real flash units.
Here's a product idea that will get you 90% of the way there:
(1) buy the cheapest iPod/iPhone cable you can find and cut off the dock connector
(2) buy one of those LED keychain flashlights and glue it to the dock connector
(3) attach it to the bottom of your iPhone; when you are ready to shoot just press to illuminate and take a picture as you normally would
(4) ...
(5) profit!
Apparently, these guys screwed up step 4.
Sounds like he's making fun of this site, specially since he mentions it by name in his fake site.
you know...that gives me an idea... there's no reason one couldn't make something akin to an LED flash that hooks to the audio output jack on the iPhone and turns on when sound starts coming out of the port and turns on when it stops. i don't know for sure, but it's possible that something that simple could work out-of-the box using the shutter sound created by the iphone app itself. it wouldn't be a 'flash' so much as a light that turns on and then off, so it wouldn't be able to freeze action or anything like that.
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