N900 Videos

Chris Stobbs filmed the prize draw at the N900 London meetup on Tuesday 17 November. Around fifty people had watched N900 demonstrations by Tanja Sauvol, Andrew Flegg and Gary Birkett.

Tanja then officiated over a draw of several prizes, including Bluetooth and wired Nokia headsets, but the big prize was an N900.

The winner was Samantha Baldini, but she wasn’t present (even though someone claiming to be her boyfriend was) so the draw was repeated. This time the winner was maemo.org user convulted. Interestingly, this was the first final retail device (i.e. not pre-release) obtained by a member of the public in the UK, as the phone is not yet on sale in retail stores or shipping from online retailers.

When asked “How does it feel?”, Convulted replied “Awesome”. I bet Samantha Baldini isn’t feeling so awesome.

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.