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!

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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”

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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.

Software

Some of the stuff I’ve tried out on the Nokia (Symbian-based):

• Google Gmail Mobile: killer app #1. Gmail on your phone kicks ass! You won’t be typing long replies, but having your email in a familiar application on your phone is something addictive.
• Google Maps Mobile: killer app #2. This gives you a glimpse at what will be possible once we have enough bandwidth: no pre-installed GPS program, but a web-based solution with maps on-the-fly, points-of-interest (speed cameras, resaturants, ATMs) always up-to-date, routes calculated at the server and maybe even new voices (speech TTS) delivered over the network.
• I mentioned Shozu before: it uploads photos and videos to Flickr, Youtube, Blogger, Typepad …

Battery

A GPS, a video camera, Wifi … you can imagine that these things suck your battery empty in no time. When using the N95 on a regular basis, don’t count on lasting two full days on a full battery. From my experience with the N91: the power consumption might improve with new versions of the firmware. In the mean time: when your phone dies because you were recording a video of your cat playing the piano, you might be mad at yourself.

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Then I bought myself a medium priced SonyEricsson V600 and was not really satisfied with it. Everything about it felt wrong. For some reason, I like the Nokia user interface much better, or even the Samsung one. The V600 buttons felt toy-like, not sturdy. Its USB interface did not have a full or mini USB connector, but something proprietary. In short, it might be an OK phone, but not for me. In girl terms: more like a Britney Spears. Predictably boring and styleless.

So I took up the N91 again, went to a Nokia service center (ARC in Zaventem, really nice people) and asked them to help me boot the phone again. When that actually worked, I also installed the new Nokia firmware (now 2.10.13) and wow, what a difference. Battery life is now well over 2 days, the phone does not crash anymore and everything works like it is supposed to. I’ve rediscovered Wifi on a phone, Google over WAP, seamless synchronisation with Outlook, hours of audio/video storage and LifeBlog, which allows me to post pictures directly to Flickr. We’re in our second honeymoon, sort of. And she’s turned into a Paz Vega: exciting, no nasty habits and still pretty in the morning.

So before we retreat to the honeymoon suite, just one remark: while it’s a good idea to let bloggers test your new products, be more clear about what stage the development is in. If I would have been asked to test the phone as a beta model, I would have had different expectations and probably more patience. I sure wouldn’t have trusted it as sole GSM and burned my fingers when it broke down on me. Anyway: now it’s out of beta: awesome phone!

Disclaimer: I do not know any of the above ladies personally, and as such, my disputable comparisons are merely based on input from gossip magazines and blogs. I might be totally wrong about their actual personality and I’ll probably never know. The main reason for the methaphore was to allow me to include pictures of girls, not phones.

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Do you remember the days before mobile phones? When being on the road meant that you could not be reached? When curly phone cords entangled in a sort of DNA structure? When you had to type the number without screen feedback and when you missed one digit, you had to start over? And when you received a call, you had no idea who it was? Nowadays we’re all used to Caller ID (or CLI), some of us even have pictures of callers popping up. I don’t know about you, but I like Caller ID, and I don’t like it when people turn it off (for some reason a lot of ’sales’ people seem to do that). If I didn’t have this one customer who blocks their numbers, I would never answer the phone on a ‘Private number’.

Five reasons why you should NOT switch caller-ID off:

1. the called person can screen your call. That is not necessarily negative, there is such a thing as ‘a bad time to call’.
2. the called person can easily call you back. No need to spell out your phone number twice on the voice mail.
3. if you called 5 times without getting through, both of you know that. Without Caller ID, those 5 missed calls could be from anyone, and so you have no reason to complain if it is not treated as an urgent call.
4. disabling your Caller ID makes you look like a telemarketing agent or stalker. No one likes getting calls from those.
5. a lot of people don’t like getting anonymous phone calls (that includes me). You’re starting the conversation with one participant already annoyed.

I don’t think I’m the only one: on the Nokia forums, most discussions on Caller ID are about how to enable it, not how to get rid of it. This is how you switch it ON:
Activate Incoming (CLIP): *30# [SEND]
Activate Outgoing (CLIR): *31# [SEND]
(via gsm-security.net)

How about you? Do you also think switched off caller-ID is impolite?

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• serial connectivity with a standard mini-USB cable – brilliant: now I can use the same cable for this phone and my Canon digital camera. One less cable to carry.
• Bluetooth – the evident close-range wireless option
• 802.11g Wifi connection: only for browsing (not for synchronisation) but still impressive. More on that later.

But the first thing I looked at, was the power supply. Nokia was always the brand that never changed its power supply adaptor from one model to the next. I always admired them for that, since every other phone manufacturer seems to suffer from the YAPS (Yet Another Power Supply) syndrome. (How hard can that be? Just tell the designers: we only make phones with this power plug. It’s a concentric 5V adaptor. Deal with it, already!) The bad news is: this time they changed it. The good news is: it’s backwards compatible (they’ve put an adaptor cable in the package). Why they had to make it smaller, I have no idea. Maybe the think they might make devices that are thinner than 3mm.

SYNCHRONISATION
When you insert the mini USB into the phone, it gives you the choice to connect:

• as a portable music player: this makes (in my case) Windows Media Player pop up and synchronize my music files.
• as a smart phone (using Nokia’s “PC Suite” software): this is for synchronising with your local contacts, calendar, … It also gets the pictures and videos from the phone, and allows you to send SMS through your phone.
• as an external disk drive:so you can throw anything on the 4GB hard drive. Some of the folders have familar names (Pictures, Videos), but I guess you could cause some wreckage by fooling around in the ‘private’ or ‘resource’ folder.

I had forgotten what it felt like to have my calendar on an electronic device. I stopped using a PalmPilot 5 years ago and since then I had to trust my memory and a huge paper agenda for my schedule. I now started using the Outlook calendar again and it syncs nicely with the N91.

IMAGE/VIDEO

There is a 2 megapixel camera in the N91. The pictures are quite sharp, although the colours are sometimes a bit off. There are artefacts around sharp colour transitions (due to compression, maybe). The zoom is clearly a digital zoom. But then again if you’re very picky about your pictures, buy a D200 and stop whining. Anyway, the task of taking pictures until your phone memory is ‘full’ is quite hard. It keeps on showing > 999 images left. Even when I started recording movies, which fills up the 4GB memory faster, I never got an indication of running out of memory.
The video camera is also a good feature. I started taping some footage of the Brussels Tango festival this weekend and the result is acceptable, certainly with the little light that was available. When fiddling with the settings, I involuntary switched it over to a smaller size (176×144 – 140Kbps instead of 352×266 – 542 Kbps). What was more surprising is that the file format then also switches from .MP4 (MPEG4 encoding) to .3GP (3rd gen Mobile Video). The small format doesn’t look like much, but that’s probably not the Nokia’s fault (.25 megapixel is not a lot).
In the highest resolution setting, 4GB of disk space gives you almost a day of recording (but only 1 hour at a time), the smaller one gives you more than 2 days of footage.

Next post will be on the musical features of the N91.

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Beause Nokia now has the opportunity to return with a vengeance. I have been asked by the kind people of TheseDays to take the new Nokia N91 phone for an elaborate test drive. A phone with a 4GB hard drive and Wifi (802.11g) built-in, I wasn’t too difficult to convince.

So in the next couple of days I will be posting about my experiences with this 165g of high-tech. I am as curious as TheseDays whether I can be convinced to switch back to Nokia. Just a glance at the contenders: at your left, the Samsung E720,at your right the Nokia N91.

The Nokia N91 will be available in Belgium somewhere next month, the one I have seems to be #3 in the Benelux. Let’s find out if three is the magic number. In any way, a big thank you to TheseDays for qualifying me as ‘an influential blogger‘ and letting me test this fancy piece of hardware.

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Some lessons I learned in the past: WAP at 9600 baud sucks, never buy an expensive phone (my + €400 Nokia 6210 broke down on me after 6 months) and don’t expect a phone to last more than 2 years.

Now, my 5510 is getting rusty and I would just like the following: a nice Nokia phone between €200 and €300, polyphonic ring tones, colour screen, Bluetooth (for the handsfree set), GPRS and if possible, an MP3 player and a camera. There is a SonyEriccson T630, so it’s not impossible.

So what can Nokia offer me:

3650: not really easy on the eyes

7650: no Bluetooth

6600: no Bluetooth

6820: no GPRS, original keyboard but robust?

N-Gage: ain’t I a bit too old for that?

And all of them, expect for the N-Gage are more like €400. You see me running around with a N-Gage? Where do I speak?

Nokia, I represent a €3000 customer over the next 10 years, and there must be a pack of people like me. Is it that hard to make an affordable nice phone with the features above? Bluetooth is mainstream now, and GPRS is not exotic. Your competitors are doing it! Even Russell Beattie, who’s a notorious Nokia fan, is waiting for you to get your design and marketing right. I’ll give it another month and see what new stuff comes out and how your 25% price drop is doing.

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