Roland Tanglao's Weblog

I am doing a mobile study with Simon Fraser University and have the original N95 for a week.

"Blink" :-) reactions after 12 hours with an N95-1:

1. The double slide *does* appear flimsy as reported by many others
2. It is much lighter than the N93
3. Limited battery life reported by others hasn't affected me yet
4. Not sure I like the multi-media key menu - after over 6 months with the N93, I am used to invoking ShoZu by hitting the multimedia key and then up; the N95 way (multi-media key and then use arrow keys to scroll to ShoZu) is slower and takes more keystrokes
5. ShoZu hasn't crashed on me yet ! Yay! But I have only taken about 20 or so pictures. I'll stress ShoZu more during my commute tomorrow morning by taking 40 or so photos during my 40 minute door to  door commute
6. Love the hardware volume keys (which I believe the N91 had)! Wish the N93 had that.
7. Love the smaller form factor. Don't miss the optical zoom of the N93 yet.
8. Menus changed yet again on the N95 versus the N93. It's a bit disconcerting but not hard to find where things are!
9. Screen seems sharper
10. Photos seem better. Need to compare with N93. Haven't tried a video yet

cool! Shozu slideshow - another viral attractor for ShoZu. Now if only Cognima and the ShoZu team would fix the crashing bugs that I experience when there are over 200 or so photos on my Nokia N93 (which I think is an S60 problem but what do I know? As always willing to run debug versions to help fix this and to act as a tester for S60 and ShoZu teams)

QUOTE

ShoZu is soon to launch a web widget that runs on all major social networking sites as well as other online services such as blogs. ShoZu Slideshow creates a virtual photo frame for camera phone pictures and videos, that anyone can create and anyone can post to any web page on the internet. The content can be updated at any time directly from the mobile phone and updates will be seen immediately by anyone who has a copy of your Slideshow.

END QUOTE

Here's my ShoZu slideshow widget:

Here’s how I made the VancityBike Share 502 movie (a video of 10 bike rides in Vancouver using stills taken with a N93)

1. Took 502 photos from my Vancity Bike Share bike over 10 one way journeys to Gastown from East Van and back using my Nokia N93. Uploaded them to flickr with ShoZu. Got lots of memory errors and other random crashes while taking pictures which I worked around by rebooting the phone. Hopefully I’ll get an N95 North American version from Nokia Blogger Relations and its doubled RAM will cure the crashes and out of memory problems. Anecdotally the problems *seem* to be related to running out of memory and an inefficient Nokia Gallery app that slows down the entire phone when you have more than 200 pictures on a card (even though in my case there was over a Gig of memory left on my memory card). Could also be a ShoZu bug.
2. Downloaded them to my Mac using FlickrBackup
3. Changed the modification times to the EXIF date using CocoViewX’s “EXIF - Tools” -> Set Modification Date to EXIF date and then “Rename Series…” using New File Name of “VancityBikeShare###
4. Using QuickTime Pro’s “Open Image Sequence command made a movie with 502 pictures using 2 frames (i.e. 2 of my pictures) per second
5. Found some Creative Commons music using ccMixtr.org and pasted it into the movie
6. Exported the movie using QuickTime Pro

Easy eh :-)? I know there are other ways to do this (Keynote, PhotoToMovie, etc!) but this is cheap and cheerful. Highly recommended as a fun way to make fun movies out of your photos!

Here’s the finished product:

This movie (4:11) was made from 502 photos taken from my Vancity Bike Share bicycle from June 27 to July 11 2007 from my Nokia N93. Music from teru used under a Creative Commons license: Technology (ft. MTGakaCaraMelG) and Start a Digital Revolution (ft. tacet, KCentric), http://terumusic.blogspot.com/

I need to also write up a long term Nokia N93 review. Read the whole thing if you are in the mood for a longish review; I pretty much agree with what Jon wrote. My quick summary: the N93 is a great mobile computer with a great camera (well as good as my beloved first digicam from 1996 - the Olympus D500) that's hampered by lack of EDGE, RAM and only 2GB memory card support. Add EDGE (and north american 3G maybe), double the RAM and support 8GB cards and you will truly have a great multi media computer. Not as great from a user experience point of view as the iPhone but a functional, versatile device for mobile power users and geeks!

FROM Jon Arnold's Blog: Nokia N93 Review:

QUOTE

Another feature with mixed utility is the zoom. You can certainly zoom in closer than with earlier models, but there’s not much point since the photos never turn out. For taking photos at conferences, I find you can only zoom in just a touch and still get passable results. Things go out of focus in a hurry as soon as you starting getting a closer look at your subject.

I love the video capabilities too – it’s really what I enjoy most about these Nokia phones. As long as you have sufficient memory, you can have a lot of fun taking short videos – zooming is easy, and the sound quality is quite good.

END QUOTE

Without the N93's optical zoom, this shot would not have been possible since I had no other camera on me. Without the N93's GPRS connectivity (too bad it doesn't support 850 MHz EDGE which is not 3G but much faster), I wouldn't have been able to upload it to flickr while I was still at the beach and get reactions to it via the N93's WebKit web browser again while still at the beach!

The combination of an optical zoom with always on connectivity is unbeatable (in spite of the imperfections of the memory management in S60v3 and the random shutoff bug that happens with the latest firmware). I am jealous of the N95's GPS but when I get an N95, I am sure that I will miss the zoom. In the meantime, I continue to groove on my awesome but flawed N93!

I was wrong on my previous post. All you need is the magical URL:
http://m.youtube.com/?client=ytdemo

This URL and YouTube mobile video works great on my N93. On my N80i, Real Player says "unable to use network. Phone is currently in offline mode. I have no SIM in my N80i but it should work over WiFi methinks. Bug I guess!

FROM Ring Nokia: Youtube's mobile site is live!:

QUOTE

Summary: Point you're browser to http://m.youtube.com/?client=ytdemo

END QUOTE

m.YouTube.com doesn't work on my N80i or N93. Quelle surprise. Fingers crossed that it will eventually.

FROM Tommi's S60 applications blog:

QUOTE

Symbian-Guru and Symbian-Freak found via HowardForums the YouTube Mobile site that Nokia announced back at 3GSM.

The URL apparently is "m.youtube.com"

END QUOTE

ShoZu geotagging with my N93 with firmware V 20.0.058 21-10-06 RM-55 N93 (01.01) only works if Nokia Maps has connected with the Tom Tom MkII GPS. I don't know why. This is a ShoZu bug I believe. Weird, once Nokia Maps has done whatever it has done, it works 100% of the time.

I've been trying out ComVu's webcast software for the N93, PocketCaster. More about that later but I did learn that there is no hardware limitation preventing you from using the video camera with the screen facing you (aka "ego videoblog mode") since it works with PocketCaster.

LazyWeb: please provide a S60 executable to do this (maybe I can do this in Python?). Better yet Nokia upgrade your firmware to enable this.

Vox offers video upload via the Atom Publishing Protocol direct from your N93 and other Nokia N series phone with Series 60 v3 (e.g. N73, N80i, N93) and it works great (check out my one and only public Vox video so far - taken with an N93)! The only problem that I see so far is that the Vox Flash video player stutters badly in Firefox 2 and Safari on my 15 inch PowerBook running Mac OS X 10.4.8

Blip.tv, please implement this too. I think all that needs to be done (heh! easy for me to say) is to implement an Atom publish protocol endpoint.

Just hack the config file that Vox provides with your own APP endpoint.

I figure changing:

<protocol_options>
<protocol plugin="Atom" version="0.3">
<endpoint_path>http://www.vox.com/atom</endpoint_path>
<roundtrip_editing>0</roundtrip_editing>
</protocol>
</protocol_options>

to a suitable blip.tv endpoint will make it work! Ha! Just a small matter of code :-) ! Challenge to blip.tv and all the other video services; you now have no excuse for not having direct video upload from phones! And please increase the per video limit from 50MB (Vox's limit) to 100MB.