BY ROGER SPERBERG
I got my hands on a Nokia N900 recently — for which I had to travel seven thousand miles and endure the company of five cellphone-addict bloggers for 48 hours, both courtesy of Nokia’s word-of-mouth marketing efforts — and I was utterly dazzled.
At one point I was explaining why we word-of-mouth-spreaders were performing professional work for no pay and little chance of recompense. As it happened, the question arose while we were standing outside the British Film Institute, just as evening was slipping in, using a cellphone to manipulate Matrix-like text being projected on the wall of the National Theatre opposite (the “Identity Project” of the BFI’s onedotzero festival).
We were all grinning maniacally, twisting and turning and shaking the device gleefully in our turn, playing what was essentially the world’s largest video game — 138 feet wide, 10,204x1080 luminescent pixels** cast by six 18,000-lumen projectors ["the Rolls-Royce of projectors" I was told authoritatively*]. “Sheer childish enthusiasm,” I explained. “Sincere enthusiasm. It’s the blogger form of professionalism, and it’s the kind of pay that regular jobs don’t provide.”
Later that evening, I had a rematch with Identity, as evidenced in the accompanying video, and you’ll note that although I was the one who needed the video made and the app’s developer on the N900, Gary Birkett, was there to show it off, I insisted on driving and making Gary take the video. Something really exciting was occurring and I felt myself in the very center of it.
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NOTE: I need to describe both the events I attended and what I discovered about the N900, so I will put these into separate posts, starting with Identity. But as I have two videos for that, I’ll put the first one here:
Also, note that the video made of the Identity projection was taken by an N900 — pretty good for a cellphone camera at night!
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* Compare that to the typical home projector’s 3-4 lumens.
** That’s 11,059,200 pixels in the overall display.
Just want to point out for benefit of people reading this at maemo.org — MaemoTalk is Reggie’s blog, but as I filled in for him attending the onedotzero conference (expenses paid by WOMworld), I’m posting my reports on his site.
So this post and the forthcoming follow-ups has been written by Roger Sperberg, not Reggie.
RogerS
[...] This is the second in a series of posts called “3 New Things About the Nokia N900.” Link to first post. [...]
[...] Sperberg, writing over on Maemo Talk, has written up his recent experiences with the Nokia N900 including “playing what was essentially the world’s largest video game — 138 feet wide, [...]