TMO member Fake has just announced his latest invention — a laser-cut stand for the Nokia N900.
The 3-piece acrylic or wood stand is now for sale for only $10, $15 if you buy two, and $20 for three (shipping included). Details on how to order, more stand pictures, and the long discussion is over at talk.maemo.org.
Nokia Conversations have been producing 30-second videos to highlight some features of the Nokia N900. If you haven’t seen them, I’ve collected them below:
How to keep it stuffed with the best apps
Multi-tasking pub window showdown
Streaming online video to big TV
Facebook video sharing and playback
Audio and video podcasts made easy
e-coach sport buddy in action
Phone calls and data monitoring skills
Stop motion mini movie battery test
Geotagging and sharing photos online
Custom backgrounds and organizing your desktops
Broadcasting live streaming video with QIK app
Playing nice with Ovi Files and Apple Mac
Motion control and touchscreen gaming
Enhancing your contacts with Hermes App
Subscribe and read RSS feeds
Instant messaging made easy
Eccentric accelerometer apps
Talking clock talktime challenge
Juggling heavyweight tasks
Blogging on the move made easy
Enhance your music with song lyrics
Scientist survival pack
Maemo web browser talents
Facebook & Twitter status updates made easy
Pocket weather station
View important docs on the go
Sketch and send an e-card
Pocket cookbook
Nokia Online/Offline as it Happens Ads N900 viral ads have been showing up in YouTube. I can’t really figure out where they are coming from and who the official poster is so let me know if you find the main site that has them or if you find new ones so I can add them to this blog entry. Anyway, here they are, in HD. They are all well made, funny, and definitely highlights the N900.
Wedding Catastrophe
Fishing
Tickets
BY ROGER SPERBERG
Gary Birkett (aka lcuk) has posted several short single-subject videos and a comprehensive overview of liqbase at YouTube.
The overview is presented in a new liqbase presentation app that has live graphics (instead of screen captures) that he clicks into and uses to demonstrate each app along the way. (Mind-blowing when you see it and think back at the long history of buggy, slow and futile efforts to do this sort of thing before.)
Among other people, I have strongly encouraged Gary to follow his imagination and keep creating the fast, visual, and kinetic apps that constitute liqbase. He’s taken our advice to heart and devoted himself full-time to N900-and-maemo (e.g, liqbase) development.
If you want to see the apps continue to flow, you probably want to visit Gary’s website, liqbase.net, and make a PayPal contribution to enable him to keep going. I have. I hope you will too. This is one developer I want to see keep developing.
The Maemo Summit 2009 finale video:
Three days of great talks, fifty sponsored participants, three hundred Nokia N900s, four hundred plus enthusiasts, and the best Maemo device to date. What a summit! Thank you Nokia, and thank you Amsterdam!
Would you believe that it’s less than a year before the next summit? Looking forward to that!
Nokia just released a new walkthrough video of the Nokia N900 browser. Mikko Korpelainen, Senior Product Manager at Nokia and Martin Shüle, Principal Designer of the User Interface team, demo the different features of the browser.
New in this video are the ‘hover and manipulation mode’ that pops-up a contextual menu on flash items (1:55), swiping gesture from the right (edge of the screen) to left to show the browsing history (3:50), selecting text and using copy (Ctrl-C) & paste (Ctrl-V) (4:23), and creating a bookmark to the desktop (5:15).
Full Video:
My good pal Michal Jerz of My-Symbian.com has just released his extensive preview of the Nokia N900. He provides a detailed run through of the hardware, software, side-by-side pics with other devices, and provides sample images and videos from the N900.
Interestingly, he mentions about playing videos from flash based sites. From some of the videos I’ve already seen online, YouTube, for example, was a bit choppy playing videos. His experience was quite opposite however:
“I have tested it with various Flash sites, including Flash videos. I’m glad to report that I haven’t found a single Flash video that wouldn’t play on the N900. While YouTube (the “full” version of it, not the mobile one) videos play 100% smoothly and with full frame rate…”
He also provides some screenshots of the software that I have not seen before like the rich-text email editor, calendar views, phone portrait mode screens, PDF reader app, and Documents To Go (Word, Sheet, and Slideshow) .
Sample Video:
Michal ends his review with this note:
“Even now, at the previewed unit’s early development stage, the N900 truly impressed me with its FANTASTIC PERFORMANCE, STABILITY (it was really ROCK STABLE, take my word), BEAUTIFUL and ADVANCED user interface, very high quality and full integration of TELEPHONY and INTERNET CONNECTIVITY, fast and powerful web browser, great support for VoIP (especially Skype), high quality camera and video recording and, actually, ALMOST EVERYTHING ELSE. I don’t remember being that excited with any mobile device since the first Nokia Communicators and UIQ 2 phones. Really! Multiple questions posted on the forums about how the N900 compares to existing Symbian OS phones can only get one answer: they just DON’T compare, the N900 is a wholy different league. If any of the existing mobile devices can be (honestly) called a mobile computer then the N900 deserves such a name in the first place.”
Great review Michal!
Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.
*Image and video courtesy of My-Symbian.com
BY ROGER SPERBERG
This is the second in a series of posts called “3 New Things About the Nokia N900.” Link to first post.
Here is a video made in London in which Gary Birkett explains the Identity controller’s features. Note that the first and last sections, showing the Identity projection, were taken on an N900 (and the middle section by a simple POS camera):
EDIT: Here is onedotzero’s official video with Karsten and Gary:
The onedotzero festival is about the moving image, not computing or mobile telephony, which made it a non-obvious showcase for the N900. It combines “collaborative music, film and live performance, and playful interactivity, digital arts and culture,” and it inhabits a creative space exciting to the Wieden+Kennedy London advertising agency. (They explain that “the ideas and curiosities of Wieden+Kennedy inevitably overflow outside the traditional world of advertising. We are constantly experimenting with new forms of communication and creative expression.”)
So it seems really natural that W+K would attempt to express the identity of onedotzero this year by visualizing all the online discussion about the event on Twitter and the blogosphere, as well as at Flickr and Vimeo. To instantiate their idea, W+K turned to programmer Karsten Schmidt, who collected the various feeds, processing them in real-time using six powerful computers (and programming in the Processing language) to stream ribbons of text, very Matrix-y in its feel, into the shapes of letters.
To accentuate the real-time and interactive nature of, well, everything, the shapes formed by the text-ribbons were actual SMS messages texted from cellphones to the system. And to make it emphatically interactive (and mind-blowingly fun), the letter-shapes and text-ribbons could be stretched, twisted, revolved, animated, enlarged and frozen interactively.
To transform this conception from a mere artistic expression on a computer screen into festivalgoer-involved experience required those six HD projectors and an easily accessible (and easily used) controller.
That’s where Gary Birkett, our own lcuk, came into the picture. That and the events of 13 November 2008.
That’s the date that Wieden+Kennedy London was named “lead global strategic and creative agency for Nokia’s Nseries business.”
So instead of utilizing a Wii remote or Apple iPhone, both familiar, handheld devices with accelerometers in them, W+K opted for the jaunty, new soon-to-be-released N900 from its client, Nokia.* And Gary created an interface for the N900 for the accidental gameplayer handed the device. His app interprets a user’s twirling or shaking or screen-drawing for a seventh computer in Karsten’s array, which causes the huge projection to respond instantaneously.
To manage this, Gary used his own liqbase framework to create his application. And, like other liqbase modules, this controller will be distributed as open-source software.
Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.
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* That’s the real world, and I’m not complaining or ruing the events that led to my being invited to London to see the whole thing come together. Thanks to WOM World / Nokia, in fact! But the uniqueness of the N900 will come across more clearly when the PUSH project winners appear.
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.
You’ve seen Ari Jaaksi and Peter Scheider’s interviews. This time, Jussi Makinen, Nokia Maemo Devices Marketing Manager, along with Andrew Flegg and Gary Birkett of maemo.org, answer questions from bloggers, including Maemo Talk’s Roger Sperberg, during the onedotzero_advetures in motion event in London.
My good pal Jay Montano of My Nokia Blog, posted a 52-minute(!) video of the session. If you don’t feel like watching the video, Jay has summarized the Q&A session, emphasizing the important points on his blog (link).
Full video: