Archive for the 'nokia' Category

Nokia Trends Lab @ AB

Published on May 7, 2008 in Brussel and nokia. Closed Tags: , , .

This Friday in the Ancienne Belgique: Nokia Trends Lab with Shameboy. There was a remix contest for a Shameboy song and it was won by Pieter Santens. I also downloaded the tracks last week and thought I’d use Acid Express to make a quick remix. But I quickly realized that I was so used to using the full version of Acid that going back to Express was like stepping from a Saab onto a scooter and still trying to hit the highway. So I stopped. Unfortunately I can’t find the winning remix on the Lab site.

Nokia Trends Lab is a cutting-edge event which combines mobile phone technology with creative and experimental art. Shameboy will look for local talent to remix their single, ‘Splend It’ from their Heartcore album. As an exclusive to Nokia Trends Lab, Shameboy has allowed samples of ‘Splend It’ to be temporarily featured online. The participant who creates the most memorable and original remix will be invited by Shameboy to record the track in the studio on 4 May. The remix will debute at the Nokia Trends Lab event which takes place on Friday 9 May at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels. The music video for the remix will be shot during the event, by young talents using Nokia N95 8GB. These young talents will also be selected through a Film Lab on the Nokia Trends Lab website. The music video will then be aired on JIM.

If you still want free duo-tickets: send an email to info@nokiatrendslab.be with as subject “Shameboy tickets”. It’s also on Facebook!

Jealous computers

Published on July 23, 2007 in advertising, mobile and nokia. Closed


Dr Shopova warns for the wave of aggression by jealous computers, jealous because of the Nokia N95. As an owner of a N91, I have had my camera go on strike occasionally or deliberately underlighting my pictures, but never suffered any bodily harm. Let’s see what happens now that I switch to Proximus and will be reading my Gmail over 3G.
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The Barcamp video saga: background

Published on June 12, 2007 in audio-video, barcamp, nokia and scripting. Closed

I’ve had a number of requests from attendees of the Barcamp Brussels 3 event. “The speeches were recorded on Nokia N95 phones, right? How come we haven’t seen them yet on Youtube/Google? What’s taking so long?” Well, here’s the answer.

The reason is purely me. I received the N95 video’s (3DVDs, about 12GB in total) from Fré quite soon after the event. At the time, I was ‘just going to throw them’ on Google Video, maybe with a title image before the movie that included a Barcamp and Nokia logo. How hard would that be, right? Well, slightly harder than I thought. The files were huge, so had to be transcoded to something smaller, there were too many files to do things manually, so I needed to start scripting, and the tools I used for it, ImageMagick and FFMPEG are powerful but tricky. That combined with my tango activities, a holiday, a girlfriend abroad and the non-negligeable fact of having a day-time job made for this delay of over a month. Mea culpa. But the wait is over.

These are the first videos. Feedback on video, sound and other details are welcome! I will then proceed with the conversion of the other ones. I will also do a post on what tricks I used to do the video rendering of the title, the transcoding and the merging of video files.

Jeroen De Cock – “Online communities & offline events”

Will Moffat – “Introduction to Freebase”

The Nokia N95

Published on May 11, 2007 in nokia. 13 Comments

Nokia 019
I am one of the blogger-testers of the new Nokia N95. I received one of the first phones two weeks ago and have been using it now as extra phone. As I was also one of the beta-testers of the Nokia N91, I’ll concentrate on the differences between these two high-end smartphones.

N95 vs N91

  • GPS: this I have never experienced in a phone before. The phone came with maps for Benelux on its 1GB card. The mapping functionality is free, the routeplanner too, but if you want the phone to read you the instructions (“in 500m, turn left”) you need to pay: per year, per month or per week. Interesting business model. TomTom e.g. charges you for extra countries, but the instruction reading is always included. To be honest, you cannot compare the N95 GPS to the TomTom One (of which I am a very happy user). The GPS sensor is not as strong, so you need more time to lock into the satellites, and you lose them more easily. But it’s still an impressive feature, certainly when combined with the camera function (geo-tagged photos on Flickr). As more and more location-based services will become available for mobile devices, a built-in GPS might become a more common feature. Strictly speaking, just a GPS sensor (not the map data, not the route planner) is already worth quite a lot.
  • Internet: the N95 uses the same browser as the N91, but the screen is much better, certainly when you switch to landscape mode. I also have the impression that Proximus Live! is a faster and robuster way to connect to the Internet than Mobistar’s “Orange World” which I’m using now. I’m switching to Proximus soon anyway.
  • Camera: quality-wise it’s a big step: from 2 megapixels to 5 megapixels, with better contrast and better focus. But while the N91 is a slow photo camera, the N95 is super slow. There are easily 2 to 3 seconds between the moment you push the button and the actual photo. You won’t be using it for sports photography. But the image, even after maximum digital zoom, is still way better. There’s also the option to upload your pictures to Flickr right away. On the N91, you still needed Shozu (excellent program by the way), with the N95 that functionality is built in. To be honest, Shozu is still better: it also supports uploading videos to YouTube, geotagging and upload queuing. Shozu is free and works on the N95, so no worries.
  • Wifi: I’m spoiled, I’m already used to this on the N91. But the N95 can scan continously and connects automatically. And the adding of new access points is finally more intuitive. Wifi on a mobile phone opens a whole new world of applications. The browser benefits from it, obviously, but also the photo uploading, RSS reading … There should be more applications for the wireless network, or if there are already, Nokia should promote them more.
  • Gallery: the application that lets you browse the photos and videos you made is much slicker than the N91.
  • Storage: the Nokia N91 has a 4GB of 8GB hard disk inside, which takes up a lot of battery, and it obviously cannot be removed. The N95 uses these itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny Micro-SD cards, which now go up to 2GB, but 4GB soon. The N95 has the better future ahead.

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