N900 Videos

Mark from thenokiablog.com shows how the email application works on the N900.

The walkthrough starts with Nokia Messaging already set up on the device, although Mark shows us how Nokia’s setup wizard allows you to choose from a long list of preconfigured service providers, including of course the usual ones like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail, plus Ovi Mail, Exchange and many, many more.

Once it’s set up you see a scrolling list of your messages (with unread messages coloured orange). There’s a “New Message” button at the top of the list. Click on a message title to read it, then on the Image icon if you want to load the images. If you’re on a slow connection, or an expensive one, you may prefer not to load the images.

The application makes good use of screen real estate. While reading an email, the message occupies the full width of the display. There’s a row of icons along the bottom: “Reply”, “Reply to All”, “Forward”, “Send to Trash”, “Load Images”, “Back” and “Forward”.

Hitting “Reply” brings up a simple window showing sender, recipient, subject and the message text. You can change the email account that you send from. You can select the font, text size, text colour, bold and italic. When you’re finished there’s a “Send” button.

No mention was made of attachments in this video. Everything that was shown looks pretty smooth, however if you click through to the blog post you’ll see a list of shortcomings that Mark experienced when using this pre-release application, together with some screenshots.

Chippy from UMPCportal shows us the N900’s TV-out capability. He’s playing a DivX video encoded at over 4 megabits per second.

First we see the movie playing on the N900 itself, then the camera moves back to reveal the same movie playing on a 50 inch TV screen. Chippy is using the N900’s PAL output for the TV playback, although the N900 can also be switched to NTSC. Chippy describes the output as “surprisingly good” and “not embarrassing at all”.

The DivX source file is 720 x 400 pixels, at a bitrate of 4.2Mbps. The TV-out connection is composite analogue. It connects via a cable which has a 3.5mm jack at the N900 end, and three RCA plugs at the TV end (white for audio left, red for audio right and yellow for video composite).

Blogger Chris Stobbs took a series of videos of the N900 meetup held in London on Tuesday 17 November 2009.

The third of his videos shows Gary Birkett (who is lcuk on maemo.org) demonstrating his liqbase software which he originally wrote for the N810 but has updated for the N900.

Gary’s liqbase software is remarkable in many ways. He calls it a “playground” and that’s what it is. It’s an easy interface to an eclectic mix of applications. What all of the applications have in common is that they are fast and fluid. Navigation is rapid, by panning and zooming. It really flows well and looks great!

There’s a stylus-driven handwriting note-taker that lets you flick back into its history, and you can merge your notes with photos taken on the device. Switch to the calendar and you can write your appointments over single days or scrawled over a multi-day chunk of the calendar. Switch apps and you can be panning and zooming a London Tube map just as fluently as you were zooming your handwritten notes. You can zoom right out until you see multiple “cards” on the screen, each full of notes and photos.

The audio on this video is very quiet, and it’s hard to make out what Gary is saying, but it doesn’t matter too much because the software shows itself off very well.

We also see the visualization software which Gary showed off at the onedotzero conference. It combines movements of the device (shake and touch) with messages. The movement is the message, as Marshall McLuhan might have said!

Blogger Chris Stobbs took a series of videos of the N900 meetup held in London on Tuesday 17 November 2009.

This is the second of his videos, and shows Andrew Flegg (”jaffa” on maemo.org) demonstrating the N900. Unfortunately the audio is very quiet on this video, and it’s hard to tell what Andrew is saying.

He starts by demonstrating Hermes, an application which can fetch your friends’ info from sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and use this info to populate your contacts’ information with birthdays, photos etc.

Andrew also shows how to add an event to the calendar.

Blogger Chris Stobbs took a series of videos of the N900 meetup held in London on Tuesday 17 November 2009.

This is the first of his videos, and shows the N900 being demonstrated by Nokia’s Tanja Sauvol using an LCD TV plugged in to the video output of the N900.

Tanja points out that with Maemo you can start up your preferred applications (such as the browser) in the 1GB of application memory (256MB RAM, 768MB swap) then just leave the applications running in the background for quick access. She says she has had 25 or more applications running at once.

Tanja then shows us messaging and notifications, and demonstrates usage with multiple email accounts You can synchronise your contacts with multiple synchronisation services. She then showed the 3D “rolling-ball” game Bounce Evolution.

Because the N900 lends itself to “always-online” use, you can see your friends’ latest status and share your own status with them. You can share your location too, if you like.

For now, additional free applications are available only through Maemo Select, but after a software update applications will also be available through Nokia’s Ovi store.

Bhaskar Roy, cofounder of Qik, demonstrates Qik live video sharing on the N900 in this video from thenokiablog.com.

Qik has a very simple user interface. The screen is the viewfinder of the video camera, with three icons overlaid on the right-hand side: Title, Share, and Privacy.

The big green “Share” button starts streaming live to whichever social networks, blogs or other services you have configured. Your video stream can be private or public, and you can overlay titles. You can also bring up the usual Maemo menu to change other settings.

Bhaskar then tells how pleased they are with Maemo, and how they were able to port the basics of the Qik client to the N900 in a few days, and how they appreciated the help they received from Nokia.

By the way, the N900 doesn’t change the focus during a video, so you need to be sure to set the focus correctly at the start of your video (by pointing the camera at an object at a suitable distance).

This demo is from Brett Butterfield, founder of Pixelpipe, showing us what Pixelpipe can do on the N900. The Pixelpipe plugin is integrated directly into Maemo, and lets you upload your photos and videos into the cloud.

After you take a photo, a Share button pops up on the right. You can share via Email, Bluetooth or Services. Selecting Services takes you to your Pixelpipe account dialog, from which you can tag the photo. These tags can include routing tags (tags preceded by “@”) which can be used to override your default settings. For example a routing tag of @Ovi would upload the photo to Ovi. Add a title and a description, and click Share, then your photo gets uploaded in the background.

You can do the same thing from the image gallery, for one or multiple images. You can also upload videos in the same way.

Pixelpipe offers over 110 upload destinations. The demo is impressive, and at this point I’m wondering what is the business model for Pixelpipe, and are there any downsides such as lock-in?

Mark Guim of thenokiablog.com demonstrates focusing on the N900’s video camera. The camera autofocuses on the center of the picture when you push the camera button half-way. Filming starts when you push the camera button fully down, but there’s no way to change the focus during a shot, so you can’t pan from a close-up to a distant view in a single shot without one or the other being out of focus.

Mark illustrates this with two sequences.

First he films his badge at close range. It’s in good focus. As he moves the badge further from the camera, the image goes out of focus, and when he pans the camera to a soccer game in the distance, the image is very blurred.

Going the other way, Mark starts filming the soccer game in sharp focus, but when he pans to his name badge it’s out of focus.

If you want to film close and distant subjects, you will need to capture two separate videos and stitch them together afterwards.

Presumably the autofocus is disabled during filming to prevent the sound of the autofocus motor from being captured by the microphones, but it would be nice if refocusing was possible on demand, for example by tapping the viewfinder.

This video from Nokia Conversations walks through the initial setup of the device, when it is started for the first time. The idea is that the basic setup process will also serve as a “smart tutorial”. Learning without realising that you’re learning, in other words!

The “Language” dialog shows you how to exit the dialog without making any changes, simply by clicking outside of it (there’s no Windows-like “X” icon).

The “Time” dialog shows how to drag things around the screen (the clock hands in this case). The “Date” dialog shows how the “rollers” are flicked around to set the day, month or year.

Next we see a video of the “Get started” app, which itself contains a video of the N900. This is starting to get a bit recursive, but we see how this app teaches about the multiple desktops, how to launch applications, how to use the browser, how to switch between multitasking applications, how to access contacts, and how to return to the desktop.

This MobileDeveloperTV video shows the N900 running on WiFi. The presenter brings up Google and searches for BBC iPlayer.

Everything goes fine until he clicks “Play”. There’s a bit of buffering, after which only one or two frames per second are displayed. He clicks “Pause”, which takes quite a few tries because it’s a tiny button and he’s not using a stylus.

In fullscreen mode it’s a similar story. If anything, the frame rate is slower. YouTube plays fine, but iPlayer must be pumping out higher bandwidth video.

One solution would be a dedicated N900 iPlayer application, but we might find that when the Flash 10 upgrade arrives the playback has improved sufficiently that a dedicated app isn’t needed.

The web browsing and YouTube examples, by the way, look crisp, slick and smooth.