The Thrilling conclusion: Archaic OS + wonderful 3rdparty apps (e.g. ShoZu + Qik + Gravity) = mobile multimedia creator happiness iff:
You can get this phone at a good price (since it's now over a year old, maybe you can get the E75 at a substantial discount e.g. $200)
You don't mind the user unfriendliness of S60V3 and the puny 320x240 screen. S60 V3 is unfriendly and archaic compared to iPhone and Android and other modern mobile operating systems but Symbian has some excellent free or cheap 3rd party programs for mobile multi-media content creators i.e. Gravity + ShoZu + Qik are all free or under 10 Euro each which means that with these programs you have a multi-media creator's powerhouse.
But since the Nokia C6 was introduced does it make sense to consider the E75? Not for me. the C6 is cheaper, has a bigger screen and more up to date software!
C'mon Nokia bundle ShoZu, Qik and Gravity with the C6 and pitch the phone to multi-media creators, students and journalists! It would be a killer combo.
Got my phone bill last month and it's my highest bandwidth usage ever. 875MB primarily because I streamed 640x480 video using Qik on the E75. Just goes to show you that as I have suspected, once you start streaming at 640x480 or higher e.g. HD, your mobile bandwidth is going to start rapidly rising and suddenly having a multi-gigabyte data plan makes sense!
In other words once Apple catches up :-) with Nokia in terms of being able to stream 640x480 or higher resolution video over 3G, 3.5 G or 4G, it's going to bring the mobile network to its knees (at least the Canadian mobile networks and probably most other North American ones which are not designed for mass market video streaming)!
As I blogged about before (e.g. with my N999 concept), the future is great cameraphone pictures & video coupled with always on, always available connectivity. And the closest thing so far to this future is 3.5G combined with a cameraphone with a decent video camera and still camera, i.e. not the current iPhone's cr*ppy camera.
Sometimes I actually see glimpses of the future. That's how I felt tonight with Qik streamed live (check out the video below after the break) over HSDPA 3.5G from the E75-1. What a great wonderful tool for artists and journalists. Imagine if instead of the decent camera in the E75, it was replaced with the camera from the N93 i.e. something with a usable optical zoom and a Zeiss lens!. Magic! Nokia please make it so :-)
I'm a fan of the future - quick video at Vancouver Startup Drinks
The ride is quite the phenomenon. As a 3-5 days a week bicycle commuter; it was quite liberating to "take over" the streets and cycle with impunity (if you were in the middle, not so in the back) and be a 1st class citizen (for once!) on the road rather than feeling the need to maintain a constant vigil for cars not seeing you and running you over. Is this a form of civil disobedience or are we just Critical Massh*les? To be honest, I fluctuate between both.
Lots of people taking digital photographs and using their cellphones and taking video but nobody doing this live. Imagine 5 years from now when everything is live!
My Io Gear power unit Nokia N Series power connector is flakey! Aaaargh, too late to return it too.
The N95 really isn't designed for streaming video live over a cellphone network from a bicycle. The S60 interface is designed to be used with one hand while standing still and the phone itself is not designed to be mounted on a bicycle. I would love for Nokia to build a mobile cellphone streaming device but realistically making my own with something like the Bug from Bug Labs (hopefully I'll get mine soon) will (eventually) be the way to go
Are 3rd party applications like ShoZu and Qik (if ShoZu and Qik don't port to the iPhone others will) allowed?
IF
ShoZu-like and Qik-like applications appear on the iPhone 3G and they work well and Rogers allows them with a reasonable bandwidth cap (reasonable to my multi-media creation needs is 2GB YMMV :-) !!!),
THEN (it's not a r*poff, hurrah!) AND I'll get a 3G iPhone (since net-net, it's only about $10 a month more to pay than my current $50 per month grandfathered EDGE Fido plan).
The only thing that still gives me pause is the 3 year contract but I can live with it if the apps are there!
So I guess I don't buy one on my birthday but wait to see if the 3rd party apps that I want appear and if Rogers allows them.
Had a blast bicycling and checking out Car Free Vancouver 2008 from Commercial Drive to the West End to Kitsilano and back to Commercial Drive (we skipped Main Street since it didn't start until 4p.m.)
Nokia Sports Tracker data is missing! (mine didn't turn out i.e. most of my track is missing since I had to reboot the phone thereby losing my GPS Track, aaaaargh! Jean hasn't posted his!) Things that were Great
The weather! Perfect!
Jean's McGyvered bicycle mount - although I am investigating using the N95 ProClip Motorcycle Mount, anybody know whether it will work on a bicycle?
The event itself. Rockin' great time at all venus. Great food, great happenings (e.g. mojave, Paul Jarvis' band, Japanese food, African Drum circle, etc)
Qik was rock solid. It just worked and buffered when we lost connection.
Things that weren't so great
Rogers Portable Internet combined with FreeTheNet combined with splash screen = FAIL (or at least it seemed to fail a lot more than during our 2 dry runs during today's bike ride, actually we did stream a lot more video than I thought). Next time I suggest EV-DO card from Bell or a HSDPA card (i.e. something designed for mobile connectivity, Rogers Mobile Internet is designed to be portable NOT mobile) plus a travel router like the $170 Cradlepoint CTR500 EVDO/HSDPA 3G Router . I am a supporter of FreeTheNet but again it's designed for non mobile use.
My IOGear Mobile Portable Power loose connection with my N95 caused me to run out out of power at one point - Jean's N82 had no problem so probably an issue with my phone, not the IOGear power.But probably points to the fact that the Nokia power connector wasn't designed to be connected horizontally for charging. I'd prefer a micro USB / mini USB for charging personally
Nokia Sports Tracker's 1998isms (I realize it's beta but if they had used Drupal or any modern system they'd get these things for free) - i) Bad URLs that end in .do instead of being clean ii) no search feature iii) no tags iv) no RSS for tags
Wearing my Mobile Muse 3 technical evangelist and Fearless volunteer hats, I'll be riding my bicycle with Amy Walker, publisher of the fabulous Momentum magazine about all things bicycling, as part of Car Free Vancouver 2008 starting from the Fearless Mobile Booth on Commercial Drive at 12 noon Sunday June 15, 2008. We'll ride to all the other Car Free Vancouver venues (Main Street, the West End and Kitsilano) and stream video live from my bike to the internet.
Check us out at:
Fearless's Mobile site (where we hope, tech willing, to display a stream from my bike and from a car in a sort of "car versus bike" video mashup)
In preparation for a "car versus bicycle" streaming video showdown on Car Free Vancouver next Sunday June 15, 2008, Jean (Jean's blog post has the background and lots of useful info, read it!) and I did a dry run early this morning.
A question: Anybody know of software to stream in real-time GPS coordinates in RSS, KML or Atom over WiFi or 3G or Edge from a Nokia phone?
Some observations and comments:
Helmet mounted video is more stable BUT on the whole not great because everytime we check our blind spots, the camera moves which is more disconcerting than the jitter from a handlebar mounted phone. I think as Jean noted, we'll move to a handle bar mounted solution like a Gorillopod for the real Car Free Vancouver on Sunday June 15, 2008
A bluetooth microphone with wind reduction like a the Jawbone would probably result in better sound
ShoZu is a killer app for any phone with WiFi or unlimited mobile data and Qik is a killer app for mobile phones (I have tested on Nokia's N95-1, it supposedly will be available for non Nokia phones some day) with unlimited mobile data. Why? Because mobile data reaches almost everywhere in urban centres and you never know when you want to live stream. Qik + unlimited Mobile Data gives you the freedom to stream anywhere, WiFi doesn't. The amazing thing is that Qik is only in alpha and for an alpha is high quality. It can only get better. Unbelievably it works at 320x240 over EDGE (for short videos anyway, long videos require you to plug in or you will run out of batteries); I can't imagine how much more fun and fast it is over 3G where it works at 640x480 on the Nokia N95 and N93. See some sample videos cross posted from my RCS blog after the jump.
I couldn't stay for the entire Launch Party Vancouver 3 unfortunately. But thanks to the handy dandy alpha service, Qik.com (my Qik videos), I was able successfully stream live>
three videos from my Nokia N95, one with Raincity's very own Dave Olson on the way there (mysteriously ended by a cellphone outage or was it the alpha software?), one with Jesse Silver of Sun on Open Solaris and one with Jordan Behan of Vancouver's stealth video startup Strutta.
