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.

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.