With a mobile device and the right apps, bloggers barely need to touch a conventional keypad to keep readers sated.
Popular blogging services like Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress have free apps for Android and Apple, and while those apps are sometimes flawed, they're generally good enough to download.
I found that the WordPress app (available on Apple and on Android) was the most fully featured. Whether that translates to the most helpful, though, depends on how lucky you are.
My luck wasn't great. I composed a post on a test blog and formatted the text using all of the 10 options given. The fact that it gave me that many formatting options was impressive, given the more rudimentary approaches of other apps.
WordPress then offered me a preview of the page, and everything appeared as I'd hoped. But when I published the post through the app, all of the formatting disappeared, and I was left with a post that looked nothing like what I had intended. WordPress also offers a section where you can find, follow and read other WordPress bloggers.
I expected Tumblr to offer the most far-reaching set of mobile blogging options, given Tumblr's popularity among young, iPhone-wielding users.
The Tumblr app (available for Apple and Android) generally gets more things right than WordPress. First things first. Tumblr lets bloggers upload video - imagine that! - and audio files, as well as more typical fare like embedded links.
A few more refined editing and posting features, however, are missing. You can't alter text fonts, for instance, and when choosing an image from your phone's photo library, there is no way to view the image in anything but a tiny thumbnail size.
It's an odd bit of clunky design, especially because little touches elsewhere indicate the company considered subtleties while developing the app. When you load a photo and choose to save a draft of your post rather than publishing immediately, for instance, the photo icon shows a little dog-ear to remind you of the pending post.
Like WordPress, the app also allows you to read other Tumblr bloggers.
Compared with WordPress and Tumblr, the Blogger app (on Apple and on Android) was extremely sparse. If you have a Blogger account, you sign into the app with your Gmail credentials and a simple menu waits, listing your active blogs.
From there, you can compose a post and accompany your text with a photo you either snap from within the app or choose from the library. Easy enough.
I had a few quibbles with it, though. Blogger suffered from the same photo-selection and text-editing problems as Tumblr, which is a bit bizarre given Google's history of buying or developing photo and text software.
And unlike the other services I tried, the app offered no section for reading entries from your favourite Blogger publishers.
Popular blogging services like Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress have free apps for Android and Apple, and while those apps are sometimes flawed, they're generally good enough to download.
I found that the WordPress app (available on Apple and on Android) was the most fully featured. Whether that translates to the most helpful, though, depends on how lucky you are.
My luck wasn't great. I composed a post on a test blog and formatted the text using all of the 10 options given. The fact that it gave me that many formatting options was impressive, given the more rudimentary approaches of other apps.
WordPress then offered me a preview of the page, and everything appeared as I'd hoped. But when I published the post through the app, all of the formatting disappeared, and I was left with a post that looked nothing like what I had intended. WordPress also offers a section where you can find, follow and read other WordPress bloggers.
I expected Tumblr to offer the most far-reaching set of mobile blogging options, given Tumblr's popularity among young, iPhone-wielding users.
The Tumblr app (available for Apple and Android) generally gets more things right than WordPress. First things first. Tumblr lets bloggers upload video - imagine that! - and audio files, as well as more typical fare like embedded links.
A few more refined editing and posting features, however, are missing. You can't alter text fonts, for instance, and when choosing an image from your phone's photo library, there is no way to view the image in anything but a tiny thumbnail size.
It's an odd bit of clunky design, especially because little touches elsewhere indicate the company considered subtleties while developing the app. When you load a photo and choose to save a draft of your post rather than publishing immediately, for instance, the photo icon shows a little dog-ear to remind you of the pending post.
Like WordPress, the app also allows you to read other Tumblr bloggers.
Compared with WordPress and Tumblr, the Blogger app (on Apple and on Android) was extremely sparse. If you have a Blogger account, you sign into the app with your Gmail credentials and a simple menu waits, listing your active blogs.
From there, you can compose a post and accompany your text with a photo you either snap from within the app or choose from the library. Easy enough.
I had a few quibbles with it, though. Blogger suffered from the same photo-selection and text-editing problems as Tumblr, which is a bit bizarre given Google's history of buying or developing photo and text software.
And unlike the other services I tried, the app offered no section for reading entries from your favourite Blogger publishers.