N900 Videos

The general consensus is that this is the weirdest product launch ad anyone has ever seen. Heck, for many of us it’s the weirdest ad we’ve ever seen, period.

There’s no denying that it grabs our attention. Nokia’s viral marketing department is on the pulse alright.

The accompanying text on maemoproject.com makes interesting reading too:

The release of the N900 sees the culmination of months of testing, tweaking and hard work, all to ensure that you get the device you have been hoping for.

The project however, has only just begun…

It’s all of you out there – the developers, the fans, the consumers – who are going to dictate where the device goes and what it is capable of. Get thinking, be inventive, use your imagination and push the N900 to its limits. The work you do will make this device better – better than even we thought it could be. And that’s how it should be.

The video is also available with subtitles in German, French, Spanish, Italian and Polish. If you know any of those languages, the subtitles can help with some of the words that are not clearly audible in the English version.

Although the first part seems to be about performance, it’s nice to see that the second part emphasizes user generated content, open source, and freedom of expression.

After watching this ad again, it reminds me of what Ari Jaaksi, head of Maemo at Nokia, said on his blog:

• Maemo is rough on the edges. It is a bit dangerous. It is open to experiments. It is about community involvement. I want these to stay. I do not like boring cars, either.

Indeed!

Nokia’s viral marketing department has released a series of videos based on the theme of a loser who always gets things wrong because he’s not constantly online.

In this video the loser is John, the Groom’s “best man”. The movie opens with John asleep after the stag night (”buck’s party”), together with the groom and their mates.

The landline phone rings. John wakes and stumbles over his mates to answer it. We don’t hear the message, but it must be that they are late for the wedding. Better hurry!

John wakes the others. There’s a general panic. The groom has had his chest hair shaved into a smiling face, and the hair superglued onto someone else’s face as a beard. Hurriedly they sort themselves out, doing the final preparation in the limousine ride to the church.

Outside the church they pause only to pick some flowers for their buttonholes, before racing into the church and taking their places as if nothing has happened.

There’s an uneasy silence, with members of the audience looking around uncomfortably. Something’s not right! Then the “real” groom and best man walk in. John and the others turned up at the wrong church.

As they race out of the church, an N900 appears in the foreground showing a chat between a Bruce Harrison and a Judith. They’re wondering whether John, the best man, got the message that the venue had changed. If only he had been online as it was happening.

The music is Chasing Time by Alan Pownall.

There is also a sequel: Sally’s revenge.

These viral videos from Nokia revolve around a common theme—”offline as it happens”. In this video, a loser has gone fishing in his little boat and fallen asleep.

Suddenly dozens of fish start leaping out of the water. One even leaps into the bucket on his boat, but still the loser sleeps. A fleeing flock of birds flies noisily overhead, ahead of a blazing meteor leaving a smoky trail.

Finally the fisherman awakes and looks around, in a daze. In the foreground someone slides open the keyboard of an N900. We see a picture of the meteor, being geotagged and having the “fun” tag added, before being uploaded to the cloud.

The unseen operator of the N900 was “online as it happened”, unlike the luser.

The snatches of music in the video are from Chasing Time by Alan Pownall.