N900 Videos

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?

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.

Blogger tnkgrl was lent an N900 by Nokia’s word-of-mouth marketing department, and she has been testing the N900 camera.

As she says, the best camera is always the one you have with you, and the N900 is good enough for many purposes—certainly above average for a 5 megapixel phone camera.

This sample video shows the frame rate (pretty good, although slightly choppy at times) and the resolution (very good, in my opinion, for a phone). The exposure adjusts rapidly when the subject changes from well-lit to in shadow, and this effect needs to be taken into account for shots that pan through light and dark areas.

The embedded video above is on YouTube, and will have lost some quality from YouTube’s processing. Tnkgrl provides a link to the original mp4 version from her blog post.

Jussi Mäkinen is the Marketing Manager for the Maemo Devices division of Nokia. In this TNB video he gives an extensive tour of the device.

Jussi consistently refers to the N900 as a mobile computer rather than a phone, and stresses that it runs the Maemo operating system.

First we see the four home screens from the panoramic desktop, all laden with widgets including several that are scrolling, auto-updating. Clicking on a “contact” widget brings up all of the contact methods for that person (phone, email, skype, IM, twitter…). The dashboard shows all of the open applications: contacts, bookmarks, chat etc.

Next we see the context-sensitive menus, and a demonstration of movie playback. The 5MP camera has a widescreen aspect ratio. We see Jussi taking a photo, which gets automatically geotagged and added to the gallery. From there it can be shared by email, bluetooth, or online services such as Ovi, FaceBook and Flickr.

With heavy usage, Nokia aims for one full day of battery life.

The web browser features kinetic scrolling, double-tap to zoom in/out, or alternatively spinning to zoom. A mouse pointer can be brought up by swiping in from the left. As it is moved across the screen it “hovers”, bringing up the display of tooltips. You can “click the mouse” by using the space bar on the keyboard. An on-screen icon changes the mouse pointer to active, enabling text to be selected.

YouTube videos can be played in context, embedded on the web page, using the Flash 9.4 player. When you go to the task switcher, you can still see the video running in the thumbnail, together with your other multitasked applications.

Jussi said the N900 was coming out in October 2009 for 500 Euros plus tax. As we now know, it didn’t make that date.