Tech Related

richard - Apr 6, 2008

Thanks for that. I had been wondering about that for a while.

For those of you with good data packages an application that could be a lot of fun is youtube on the n95. I was out and about and decided to check the youtube site and I was given the option to download their beta. I managed to play vides but I had no sound. What they offer are: - upload your videos from the phone - watch your friends’ videos - view relatd videos - view received videos - search for content. In other words you can do everything you’d want to from the n95 that you’d do from a computer. It does look like an interesting application although unless you’ve got wifi this is a very expensive gimmick. It’s nice to try nonetheless. Let me know if you try it and tell me what you think of it.

waveydavey001 - Mar 5, 2008

Sports Tracker is an interesting application that I’ve been experimenting with recently. If you jog and are on Jaiku come and join us on the Jogku channel

It’s fun to walk fast and far, especially in the countryside where there are fewer people to avoid. I often walk for fourty minutes to an hour at the end of the day to think about the day and process all that’s happened. Recently though I realised one of the shorter walks is almost 3000 steps thanks to the N95 pedometer. That’s because with the N95 you have a built in GPS and the ability to download applications. One of these is the sports tracker that allows you to track a number of variables across four to six screens. There’s the map view, map view with relevant details, co-ordinate view, speed view, pedometer and then three or four graphs, some for time in relation to speed, distance over time and height in relation to speed. You can zoom in and out of the graphs as you’re walking. If you do this more than once it creates a series of tracks that you can easily translate to KML and importe to Google Earth so the world can see your walks. Of course keeping your privacy from some people may be desirable. It’s a fun little addition to the n95 although the biggest drawback is you need to have it out in front of you to keep track of the satellites.

When’s the last time you visited a wap site? Have you thought of how content displays on mobile phones other than the Iphone? I hadn’t until quite recently. Recently I moved back to Switzerland and have started to work for Allthecontent / Toutlecontenu.com and they provide multiplatform content for devices ranging from televisions to mobile phones and more. As a result of reading too much American press I lost interest in what Nokia were doing until it was mentioned that the iphone is not true mobile web use. At first that statement didn’t make much sense but since then I’ve bought a Nokia N95 8 gig model and I’ve been playing with vodafone live, seeing how content is presented. It’s very simple, quick and to the point. Images are small and sparse but text is heavy. Naviguate from one menu to another and you eventually get to content that’s paying. That’s where it becomes interesting. There are quite a few topics, from sports to entertainment to adult content. Some of this content is in video form, some in MMS form and yet some more comes as text. As a result content is easily accessible from most media handsets. Then there’s the question of data packages. Look at Swisscom. For 18 swiss Francs you receive a hundred megabytes of data transfer. That’s not much when considering the 3 gigs a day of transfers via my laptop. Mobile is different. I read that not more than fifty megabytes a month are downloaded over the air. Take a look at Iphone optimised pages in contrast. They’re graphic intensive, slow to load and designed for one specific screen resolution. As a result of this that content is not accessible on most data plans or mobile devices. Iphones have a good part of the market but they’re excluding many users. You can’t download content on the iphone. You’re losing revenue right there. What I think will be interesting over the coming months is to see how the European Vs. US mentality of mobile delivered content will affect telephone operators in these markets.

Seesmic’ favourite phone at the moment appears to be the Nokia N95 and after months of thinking about whether to get the Iphone or the Nokia I turned to the Nokia because of everything it allows you to do. It’s a GPS, web streaming camera, time lapse camera, e-mail and web browser among other things. It’s also easy to use with services like Jaiku. Streaming Video stremaing from computers is becoming commonplace and as a result we’re growing tired of that piece to camera straight from people’s desk. That’s where Bambuser, Qik and seesmic come into play. Bambuser is still in alpha and has an intuitive easy to use streaming interface giving you an easy selection between the main camera and the front camera. It’s very simple to use and I’ve played quite a bit with it but there are lag issues where the stream doesn’t keep up. The settings can be adjusted quite specifically by the user allowing for quite a bit of experimentation. A second service is Qik. This one has a nice user interface and has in built buffering. This means that as you stream the application buffers and indicates the delay between what you are seeing on the phone and what is being seen. This service has too main options. Optimised for quality or optimised for creating a reliable stream. Seesmic has already been discussed but it’s a good video sharing website. It allows for conversations to take via video similarly to instant messaging. The Seesmic application still needs some work but if you’re using shozu you can record your seesmic posts and FTP the files to the site for others to enjoy. I’ve done a few posts from the car once I’ve arrived at work and the results are good, except for a loss of synchronisation… but that’s in camera rather than seesmic.  Jaiku Jaiku was developed by people who worked for Nokia and it’s similar to twitter but with a better front end mobile wise. The application automatically displays where you are, whether you’re free or busy to answer calls and you can follow conversations. **Photo Camera ** One interestig feature of the camera that I haven’t used is the ability to take a picture every ten seconds. In other words to create time lapses that last as long as you would like. I haven’t tried the option but the idea is interesting. **GPS ** I haven’t played with the GPS so far but so far it looks nice enough, I’ll write more once I know more. So far I’m happy with the N95 because of all it can do and I’m looking forward to using it extensively in the near future. As I learn more about the phone and what it can do I’ll write most posts.

With a screen resolution of 1920*1080 interlaced this is one of the higher resolution cameras currently on the market at the moment. It’s beautifuly designed for camera men rather than engineers (unlike the red). I already wrote about earlier.The light wasn’t so interesting but here are 11 seconds of footage. (92 megs) Right click to save the footage as this will not behave properly in browser

Finding your way around London is hard and after seven or more hours of driving across France from Geneva it can be a little daunting. That’s why I decided to use the Garmin Nüvi 250 to help me. It’s a small pocketable driving GPS that’s easy and intuitive to use. That’s important when you’re on the road. It’s got a small display and there are two main functions. Where do you want to go and the map. The map is either 3d or 2d depending on your preference. With the unit I bought you have 22 European countries including France, England and Switzerland. Those are the three countries I would travel through. The navigation is easy to setup. Select your destination and it will quickly trace a route of where to go. You have the ability to review the points one by one or trust the GPS to get you where you want to go. It’s got a battery life of 5hrs but included with the unit is the car adaptor so that you can power it during the trip.Easy to use and a great driving aid. It made driving through London a relaxed, stress free experience, at least on the way in. On the way out there were traffic jams which this unit did not warn me about. It’s a nice unit, not too expensive but frees up your mind for other things than trying to find your way. It’s a great little help.Â

RandellFever - Feb 0, 2008

Hey Richard - I have been on a couple of times to test it out. I like the interface design. It looks like an interesting tool for a group of people who have a specific purpose for meeting, but for random conversation I greatly prefer Seesmic.

Yeah I agree with Randell, I gave it a test run last night at my cycling social network and I think that kind of specific use is where it will prove useful.

Yahoo live is an interesting live video conferencing tool still in it’s early days. It allows you to stream video live from your webcam and watch up to four other streams at the same time. There’s a chatroom and you can see all the participants at once and select which ones you want in vision and which you’d prefer out of vision. There are a few bugs at the moment. I haven’t found sound that easy to deal with, especially since there’s a five to ten second delay. Chatting with Msiou he told me that what he had done is use skype conference calls to keep the conversation going. Of course this is a makeshift solution and some better interaction should come. My Channel, My live profile