N900 Videos

This is another 30 second video from NokiaConversations.

The proud owner of an N900 uses it to film his friend riding a BMX bicycle around the local park. The guy riding the bike is doing nothing special apart from circumnavigating a tree, but the video is being shot in “quality 16:9 widescreen”. Not “high quality” or “low quality”, just “quality”.

The caption tells us that “flinging clips to Facebook” can be done in moments, as we are about to see: click “Share via service”, add a title (and a description if you like) then click “Share”. This assumes that you’ve already set up your Facebook credentials, of course.

And there’s just time to bring up the browser window to play the video from Facebook, before the 30 seconds is up.

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?

This MobileDeveloperTV video shows the N900 running on WiFi. The presenter brings up Google and searches for BBC iPlayer.

Everything goes fine until he clicks “Play”. There’s a bit of buffering, after which only one or two frames per second are displayed. He clicks “Pause”, which takes quite a few tries because it’s a tiny button and he’s not using a stylus.

In fullscreen mode it’s a similar story. If anything, the frame rate is slower. YouTube plays fine, but iPlayer must be pumping out higher bandwidth video.

One solution would be a dedicated N900 iPlayer application, but we might find that when the Flash 10 upgrade arrives the playback has improved sufficiently that a dedicated app isn’t needed.

The web browsing and YouTube examples, by the way, look crisp, slick and smooth.

Mikko Korpelainen is a Senior Product Manager at Nokia, and he seems particularly proud of what he calls the “mighty Maemo browser”, and the full internet experience that it offers on a pocket-sized device.

The Maemo browser supports the “latest web technologies” which in practice means the Gecko rendering engine (as also used in Firefox and Fennec) plus “full Flash support” (which means version 9.4 at this time).

Performance is important, so that the device is responsive, pages load fast, and frame rates are good. Scrolling certainly looks fast on the video.

Screen real estate is precious, and as usual in these demos the New York Times home page is used to show off how efficient the N900’s Maemo browser is.

Next we see a demonstration of the browser’s “manipulation modes”: hover and select. These modes enable the browser to be used like a desktop mouse-driven browser.

Martin Schüle takes over and shows some “tips and tricks”: smooth panning, double-tap to zoom, spiral zoom in and zoom out. He slides out the keyboard, types in a URL, and loads up YouTube across a 3G connection. From YouTube, he plays a Miley Cyrus video, and it looks pretty smooth.

By swiping from the right we see the browser history as a row of thumbnails and can easily revisit a previous page. Finally, Martin shows us copy-and-paste using the familiar control-C and control-V keyboard commands that we know from desktop computers.

We are shown how to move around the open web pages using the multitasking dashboard, and how to click to add a browser bookmark or a shortcut to the desktop.

The Maemo browser (MicroB) looks great, and is in my opinion the first mobile browser to provide the “full internet experience”.

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.