App of the Week: Kicksend ups your iPhone's limit on emailing photos

The Kicksend app which allows users to email up to 30 photos and videos from their iPhone to family and friends.

The Kicksend app is handy for sending more than five images at a time from your iPhone.

Nobody likes to be told what to do or what not to do, even if getting around the restriction is little more than child's play.

I was reminded of this last month, when the Mars company announced it was discontinuing its king-size Snickers - what, do they think I've just got all day to sit around and unwrap chocolate bars?

Actually, I only tried to eat one of the giant 540-calorie bricks once in a theatre while watching Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003. I think I left half of it under the seat and still consider it a work in progress.

But no, Mars has shut my project down as part of its "broad-based commitment to health and nutrition". This initiative also includes reducing its "normal-sized" bar by 11 per cent, no doubt without reducing prices as part of its even broader commitment to profit (I can't confirm this, though - I may just be bitter, or perhaps have a low blood-sugar level).

Such real-world retreats on freedom are bad enough, but in the digital realm they are so pervasive as to be commonplace.

Post a YouTube video of your toddler dancing to a copyrighted Prince song and it will be taken down. Unscrew the back of your laptop and you'll void the warranty. Install any software that Microsoft doesn't approve of and it will be very, very disappointed in you.

And the iPhone comes with some of the strangest restrictions ever created.

Its Safari browser doesn't support Flash videos and until recently, you couldn't download anything over 3G that was bigger than 10MB (now it's a 20MB limit - yippee).

But the oddest one of all remains the iPhone's five-photo limit for e-mailing pictures to friends and family. If you want to e-mail 10, or 12, or 28, you'll have to keep track and send them five at a time, one e-mail at a time.

The app

Or you could use Kicksend (free; iPhone), an app that treats you like the adult-who-knows-his-data-plan-limits that you are.

The details

Once you open the app and create an account, you can access all photos and videos on your iPhone and send up to 30 of them, in their original size, to everyone.

If your recipient has a Kicksend account, they will get your photos or videos almost instantly in their inbox. If not, they will get an e-mail with a link to your shared files, which can be downloaded from servers in the cloud.

Kicksend offers 1GB of free data transfer per month - more data can be had by luring friends to the service, or by purchasing data packages (from Dh18 to Dh73 per month).

Not bad, under the circumstances. It all sort of makes you wish Kicksend made chocolate bars.

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