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.

Engadget reviewed a pre-production N900, after playing with it for a few days. They felt that the form factor was a good compromise between the N810 and the N97, with the N900 being a good size and shape despite its thickness.

The buttons and external controls were then demonstrated: volume, power, camera shutter, lock switch, headphone jack, infra-red window, stereo speakers, micro-USB port, lanyard slot and plastic stylus (which is fairly long and quite usable). There’s a camera with sliding lens cover similar to that of the N97 (but hopefully without the scratching problem), and a kickstand.

The reviewer was impressed by the Maemo 5 interface, finding it clean and powerful, and also fast and smooth due to the power of the N900’s Cortex A8 processor. He commented that the interface was mostly but not completely finger-friendly.

The Qwerty keyboard doesn’t slide far open, and only holds three rows of keys, making it smaller than the keyboards on many of the N900’s competitors. Nevertheless, the reviewer found the keyboard quite usable despite the unusual location of the spacebar and directional pad.

The reviewer pointed out that portrait mode is not properly supported except for the phone, and that Nokia plans to correct that in the future—but that it doesn’t hurt its usefulness as a hacker-friendly device.

The reviewer then makes some disparaging comments about the resistive touchscreen, and demonstrates some difficulty getting his gestures recognised, yet also having one button-press unintentionally recognised. Nevertheless, during the rest of the video his interaction with the screen seems to be fairly effortless and reliable.

The browser is then demonstrated. The reviewer is impressed, and describes it as the most complete browsing experience you can get today: better than the iPhone, Android or the Palm Pre (despite the resistive display!). For people whose primary need is “browsing on the road”, this could be the ideal unit.

And with that, the video is over, with a promise of another review when a production unit is available.

Micky at nokiausers.net reviewed the volume and quality of the sound from the N900’s stereo speakers, and compared it to four other Nokia phones: the N97, 5800 XpressMusic, 5530 XpressMusic and N95-1.

Each device is demonstrated in turn, put in the same place, and the same song is played: “Jump” by Van Halen.

The N95-1 goes first. It’s reasonably loud but sounds a bit distorted to me. The N97 is a bit louder, but sounds perhaps fuzzier. The 5530 sounded cleaner to me, although there’s not much in it. Micky reckons the 5800 is the loudest of the devices, and I think it’s probably the cleanest sounding too.

The N900 is almost as loud, and perhaps just slightly more distorted.

Of course when we listen to this video, we are not hearing just the sound of these phones. The sound quality is further degraded by the microphone on the video camera, and by lossy video encoding, and then again by the speakers on which we’re listening.

Despite that, these phones are all way above average for a mobile device with tiny speakers. And of course you can get much better sound quality with a pair of good headphones, or by using the inbuilt FM transmitter (where available).

Micky likes the 5800, but finds the N97 tinny by comparison. He likes the sound of the N95’s speakers, although he feels the output is lower, and the 5530 is bottom of the bunch in his opinion.

As for the N900, he feels that the sound quality is as good as the 5800 although it’s not quite so loud.

So there you have it, Micky and I perceive some of the results differently, but of course he was listening to them live so I’m happy to take his word for it. Either way, the N900’s stereo speakers are sounding pretty good.

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.