N900 Videos

This is another 30 second video from NokiaConversations.

The proud owner of an N900 uses it to film his friend riding a BMX bicycle around the local park. The guy riding the bike is doing nothing special apart from circumnavigating a tree, but the video is being shot in “quality 16:9 widescreen”. Not “high quality” or “low quality”, just “quality”.

The caption tells us that “flinging clips to Facebook” can be done in moments, as we are about to see: click “Share via service”, add a title (and a description if you like) then click “Share”. This assumes that you’ve already set up your Facebook credentials, of course.

And there’s just time to bring up the browser window to play the video from Facebook, before the 30 seconds is up.

This thirty-second video from NokiaConversations starts with the ominous sound of a clock ticking.

A guy sits outside his local pub, nursing a cappucino. The pub is the White Hart, which has 22 windows. But his N900 can open more windows than that, no bother.

We see a web browser window, a drawing application, and then the dashboard which is already up to 24 windows “and counting” when the 30-second timer goes off.

This is a rather strange video from NokiaConversations. It’s one of a series exploring the N900, each 30 seconds long and “Suggested by you, filmed by us”.

The video opens with an ominous ticking noise.

We see the N900’s Application Manager with its categories: Educational, Graphics, Location & navigation, Office, Programming, Desktop, Games, Internet & Networking, Multimedia, Other and Science.

An anonymous finger selects Games, then almost selects Bullshit Bingo but scrolls the list just in time. We don’t see what he selected, because the shot then cuts away to a big boot with a small N900 next to it. An anonymous hand pulls a shoehorn out of the shoe and tries to lever the phone with it, before deciding that it’s not needed.

I suppose the point being made is that the N900 comes with 2GB for applications, not 256MB like some lesser phones, but I suspect this allusion will be lost on many viewers.

The caption says “App Manager lets you download, install and search for new apps” as the anonymous finger chooses the Desktop category and scrolls through the “smartly organized” list of apps. The sought-after app doesn’t seem to be there, so the finger brings up the search box and types in Evernote.

There it is, and only 2.01 MB to download.

Anonymous thumb taps the “Update” button, and the caption says “Apps are best kept fresh via updates”. I was half expecting it to say “Best if installed by 13 November 2009″, but in fact the next line says “You’ll be alerted or can check if your eager”. Ouch! Grammar Fail!

The loud ticking is now back with a vengeance, as ominous as ever. Suddenly, we see that the “Facebook Widget and Photo Uploader” needs to be upgraded, and a startlingly loud alarm goes off. Yikes!

The bride’s wedding was messed up because the groom and his best man were offline as the venue change happened.

In this followup, Sally gets her revenge on “John and the boys” for turning up at the wrong venue.

She tells them they’re probably wondering why they didn’t get their groomsman’s gifts, and that’s because she still has them and is about to auction them on eBay.

Sally signs off with “Bye bye boys, and happy shopping.”

Groomsman’s gifts? Not in my day there weren’t.

Mikko Korpelainen is a Senior Product Manager at Nokia, and he seems particularly proud of what he calls the “mighty Maemo browser”, and the full internet experience that it offers on a pocket-sized device.

The Maemo browser supports the “latest web technologies” which in practice means the Gecko rendering engine (as also used in Firefox and Fennec) plus “full Flash support” (which means version 9.4 at this time).

Performance is important, so that the device is responsive, pages load fast, and frame rates are good. Scrolling certainly looks fast on the video.

Screen real estate is precious, and as usual in these demos the New York Times home page is used to show off how efficient the N900’s Maemo browser is.

Next we see a demonstration of the browser’s “manipulation modes”: hover and select. These modes enable the browser to be used like a desktop mouse-driven browser.

Martin Schüle takes over and shows some “tips and tricks”: smooth panning, double-tap to zoom, spiral zoom in and zoom out. He slides out the keyboard, types in a URL, and loads up YouTube across a 3G connection. From YouTube, he plays a Miley Cyrus video, and it looks pretty smooth.

By swiping from the right we see the browser history as a row of thumbnails and can easily revisit a previous page. Finally, Martin shows us copy-and-paste using the familiar control-C and control-V keyboard commands that we know from desktop computers.

We are shown how to move around the open web pages using the multitasking dashboard, and how to click to add a browser bookmark or a shortcut to the desktop.

The Maemo browser (MicroB) looks great, and is in my opinion the first mobile browser to provide the “full internet experience”.

The general consensus is that this is the weirdest product launch ad anyone has ever seen. Heck, for many of us it’s the weirdest ad we’ve ever seen, period.

There’s no denying that it grabs our attention. Nokia’s viral marketing department is on the pulse alright.

The accompanying text on maemoproject.com makes interesting reading too:

The release of the N900 sees the culmination of months of testing, tweaking and hard work, all to ensure that you get the device you have been hoping for.

The project however, has only just begun…

It’s all of you out there – the developers, the fans, the consumers – who are going to dictate where the device goes and what it is capable of. Get thinking, be inventive, use your imagination and push the N900 to its limits. The work you do will make this device better – better than even we thought it could be. And that’s how it should be.

The video is also available with subtitles in German, French, Spanish, Italian and Polish. If you know any of those languages, the subtitles can help with some of the words that are not clearly audible in the English version.

Although the first part seems to be about performance, it’s nice to see that the second part emphasizes user generated content, open source, and freedom of expression.

After watching this ad again, it reminds me of what Ari Jaaksi, head of Maemo at Nokia, said on his blog:

• Maemo is rough on the edges. It is a bit dangerous. It is open to experiments. It is about community involvement. I want these to stay. I do not like boring cars, either.

Indeed!

This is another of Nokia’s viral N900 videos, designed to show the perils of not being online all the time.

The habitual loser is about to finish up at work. He has been designated to camp overnight outside the stadium, to be sure of getting the best tickets for the game of the year. He collects payment from his co-workers, and gives the thumbs-up to assure them that everything is under control.

He arrives at the stadium as night is falling, and settles down in his sleeping bag together with a bunch of other fans.

Next morning he wakes as a dog licks his face. An expensive pair of Nokia headphones hang from his head. Looking around, all he sees is two friendly homeless people, but behind him we can see that “sold out” has been slapped onto all the posters.

An N900 appears in the foreground, with the multitasking screen showing. A thumb brings the web browser to the foreground and we see it’s displaying soccernet.espn.go.com which shows a soccer ball, the word “FINAL”, and the message “Tickets sold out online”. If only the loser had been online as it was happening.

The music is “Chasing Time” by Alan Pownall.

Nokia’s viral marketing department has released a series of videos based on the theme of a loser who always gets things wrong because he’s not constantly online.

In this video the loser is John, the Groom’s “best man”. The movie opens with John asleep after the stag night (”buck’s party”), together with the groom and their mates.

The landline phone rings. John wakes and stumbles over his mates to answer it. We don’t hear the message, but it must be that they are late for the wedding. Better hurry!

John wakes the others. There’s a general panic. The groom has had his chest hair shaved into a smiling face, and the hair superglued onto someone else’s face as a beard. Hurriedly they sort themselves out, doing the final preparation in the limousine ride to the church.

Outside the church they pause only to pick some flowers for their buttonholes, before racing into the church and taking their places as if nothing has happened.

There’s an uneasy silence, with members of the audience looking around uncomfortably. Something’s not right! Then the “real” groom and best man walk in. John and the others turned up at the wrong church.

As they race out of the church, an N900 appears in the foreground showing a chat between a Bruce Harrison and a Judith. They’re wondering whether John, the best man, got the message that the venue had changed. If only he had been online as it was happening.

The music is Chasing Time by Alan Pownall.

There is also a sequel: Sally’s revenge.

These viral videos from Nokia revolve around a common theme—”offline as it happens”. In this video, a loser has gone fishing in his little boat and fallen asleep.

Suddenly dozens of fish start leaping out of the water. One even leaps into the bucket on his boat, but still the loser sleeps. A fleeing flock of birds flies noisily overhead, ahead of a blazing meteor leaving a smoky trail.

Finally the fisherman awakes and looks around, in a daze. In the foreground someone slides open the keyboard of an N900. We see a picture of the meteor, being geotagged and having the “fun” tag added, before being uploaded to the cloud.

The unseen operator of the N900 was “online as it happened”, unlike the luser.

The snatches of music in the video are from Chasing Time by Alan Pownall.

This video comes in four parts. The first twenty seconds is a graphics extravaganza, showing blobs of light and gleaming metallic components coming together to form the bright dawning of a new product: the N900.

The next part runs at a frenetic pace and shows glimpses of what the N900 can do: home screens, app launcher, web browser, the Ovi store, messaging, video playback, multitasking, desktop widgets, contacts and chat.

The phone is then rotated and we see the lens cover slide open, revealing the camera with its two-LED flash, which fires. The taken photo shows us that we are in what appears to be a second-hand bookshop with 1970’s carpet. The geotagging shows that this is Helsinki, Finland, in 2009 and everything makes sense when we see the tags “comic” “convention” being added before the photo is uploaded to the cloud.

Finally we hear the familiar Nokia ringtone, and we are reminded that this mobile computer is also a cellphone handset. The screen presents the options “Answer” and “Reject”. Even though this dude is at a comic convention, he’s not too embarrassed to accept a call from his mother. The consensus is that her avatar shows a young and pretty mom, so perhaps he doesn’t need to feel too awkward about it. But we never hear the conversation, because it cuts to a closing shot showing the multitasking, with the movie still playing in a thumbnail window. Not too sure how useful that is though.