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?

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.

Ovi Maps 1.0 has been supplied with pre-release N900s, although we can’t say for sure what’s on the production models.

It’s a competent mapping application, although fairly basic. This ubergizmo video shows panning and zooming of US maps, with “over-the-air” downloading of new map tiles. The +/- buttons zoom in steps, or can be held down for rapid zooming.

Alternatively, you can press the zoom-level indicator to choose from four pre-set levels (country, state, city and street). The maps are quite readable at each level, although perhaps not quite as richly detailed as Google’s maps. Satellite and terrain view are also available, as well as a “night view” – the purpose of which isn’t clear to me.

An address panel shows the current location, and there’s a search box to jump to places of interest. A compass icon allows you to rotate the map to any orientation.

All-in-all it’s an adequate application, although many people will be waiting to see what alternatives become available.