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
Today I tried out flixwagon, "a stream live from cellphone" competitor to Qik. I did a "Carcast" direct from my N95 (mounted on the empty passenger seat with my Gorillapod) as I drove from Gastown to the Viaduct (12 minutes). Impressive!
What Flixwagon seems better at then Qik:
Better buffering
More "Ajax-y" website
What Qik seems better at then Flixwagon:
Non Cheesy look and feel. I could live without the little flixwagon icon moving about before the video is shown and the "too cute" flixwagon smiley icons.
Higher Resolution. Qik seems to be higher resolution the flixwagon. Qik is 320x240, Flixwagon seems to be lower resolution
Better URLs. There seems to be no flixwagon equivalent of qik.com/roland. If it's there I couldn't find it.UPDATE: it's there! found it by URL hacking, no obvious link when logged in, my page is indeed flixwagon.com/roland
Anyways the proof is in the video and both Qik and Flixwagon are evolving at a rapid rate, so let the competition continue!
Check out my flixwagon "CarCast":
The current alpha (so fix it please ASAP :-) ) version of Qik hangs forever if the WiFi Access point you have configured is not available. Here's the steps to reproduce this:
Configure Qik to access a WiFi access point e.g. "Raincity Studios"
Walk out of range of the WiFi Access point
Start Qik
Voila! It hangs forever
Other than this bug, I am pretty happy with Qik. It's a great service.
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.
