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:
The double slide *does* appear flimsy as reported by many others
It is much lighter than the N93
Limited battery life reported by others hasn't affected me yet
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
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
Love the hardware volume keys (which I believe the N91 had)! Wish the N93 had that.
Love the smaller form factor. Don't miss the optical zoom of the N93 yet.
Menus changed yet again on the N95 versus the N93. It's a bit disconcerting but not hard to find where things are!
Screen seems sharper
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)
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.
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.
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###
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
Found some Creative Commons music using ccMixtr.org and pasted it into the movie
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!
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Who needs a desktop or laptop computer when you can upload videos over WiFi to services like the most awesome blip.tv? Well I do until I have decent text entry on the N93 or whatever video phone I happen to be using (and for now I guess that means a QWERTY keyboard of some sort although I am willing to bet there's lots of room for creativity here!)
All I can say is Go Web Browser for S60 go! And of course go blip.tv go!
Lovely Christmas carol singing (Have yourself a Merry Christmas) from Afterglow (604-461-1409, afterglowquartet AT gmail.com) uploaded directly from my N93 over WiFi using the browser for Series 60.
Unlike the N93, the N73 camera app allows photos to be arbitrarily labeled instead of being hardcoded to 'Image xx'. Thank goodness Nokia didn't break this on the N73 too.
After using the N73 for a while, not having 850 MHz and EDGE support on the N93 is painful simply because the reception is bad in my house (I guess and have heard that 850 is what Rogers is putting in and the lower the frequency the better it works indoors) and ShoZu uploads over GPRS are reaaaaaalllllllly slow. I will never again buy a phone without quad band support!
As pointed by Phone Boy, the N93 lens cap strap is very nice but it's not obvious. It's on page 15 of the English language version of the N93-1 manual. I figured it out right away because I am paranoid about smudging the lens! And also very absent minded so a lens cap without a strap is useless to me.
Anyways here's a photo (taken with the N73's fantastic macro mode) that illustrates how to attach the lens cap strap:
The N93 camera app doesn't allow photos to be arbitrarily labeled e.g. 'Roland in Vancovuer' instead they are hardcoded to 'Image xx'. Please bring it back Nokia in a future firmware update!
Is there a way to turn the N93 screen so that I can see myself while shooting a 640x480 30fps movie? There doesn't seem to be which is a major disappointment since I planned on doing lots of "me as talking head" full resolution videos. I can turn the screen and look at myself while filming but then it uses the secondary camera which films at CIF resolution. Please fix in the post version 20 N93 firmware update (N93 Firmware version 20.0.58 doesn't appear to have it).
The N93 suffers from the the lack of standard hardware interfaces. Forget the POP port! Put a standard tripod jack (I guess I'll buy the Nokia DT-22 tripod that Darla mentioned assuming I can find it in Canada, fat chance! In the meantime if anybody has a way to mount the N93 so I can shoot talking head videos of myself, please email roland AT rolandtanglao.com or phone 604 729 7924), USB port and a headphone jack in every phone Nokia, please! The POP port belongs to the past. Thanks! End of rant :-) !
Finally, I guess I'll buy a POP Port to Standard headphone jack adapter so I can listen to music on my phone in the car like I used to with the N91!
The N93 Video is impressive but it takes a lot space. 100MB for 5 minutes. So, it's quite the chain of pain to get the video and share it (yeah I know you could compress it but that takes too much time!) since most sharing services e.g.blip.tv and revver only accept 100MB videos. My 5 minute video above of the Skyte is well over 100MB. Luckily, Google Video has no limit (but the average non techie non geek person is not going to go through the hoops that I went through to post on Google Video; they'll want something easier like YouTube; now that Google owns YouTube perhaps the limits will be raised!).
Nokia needs to address this in future video phones probably by running a companion web service (or partnering with one) and also doing more compression in hardware.
The first video I did with my N93 was a 5 minute one of the SkyTrain (of course!). It's an awesome video but its 100MB (since I did it at 640x480 30fps MPEG4). I tried to upload it to Brightcove (since I know it won't work on blip.tv, my fav service; file is too big) but it didn't work. The Brightcove Mac OS X uploader, Brightcove Publishpod, successfully encoded the MP4 to flash video aka FLV but the sites says it's processing (and it's been saying that for 24 hours!).
I guess I'll try Google Video. I did search the Brightcove knowledge base and FAQs but found no documentation for video file upload limits or that MPEG4 (and yes I know there are many variants of MPEG4 and perhaps Nokia's is not supported) was not supported. Ah well early days. Brightcove sounds great (Robin Good's Brightcove review makes it sound wonderful) but I couldn't get it to work.
