n70

I think the photos are as good as the ones on the Nokia N70 (except of course there is no flash) which is two year old technology. What do you think?

KRZR K1:

Nokia N70

Apples to Oranges comparison to be sure! I have 2000 other N70 photos for you to compare if you don't like the one above :-) !

The KRZR K1 video is decent CIF quality but it's two year old techology. The Nokia N70 videos were just as good quality back in 2005.

Check it out and judge for yourself:

KRZR K1 video of the Skyte (blip.tv bug, I rotated the original but the flash video below is not rotated: original KRZR K1 Skyte 3GP Video with correct orientation)

Not bad CIF quality. Not great either. About as good as the N70 which is now 2 years old. Not nearly as good as an Nokia N93

Compare and contrast with Richard's Nokia N70 video of the Skyte

Happy belated Canada Day and happy July 4th to my American cousins.

I am still here. Just took a wee bit of a blogging rest.

Had a nice conversation with Andy Abramson at BloggerCon IV. He told me nicely that my 850 Mhz post was bogus :-) (and pointed me to a nice explanatory mopocket post about the cingular walled garden: "Basically this means that if Cingular does not recognize your phones International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number then you can't use things like MobiTV, Rabble and a host of other applications that companies that are on deck with Cingular have sent me to try but would not install. Your phone must be a Cingular branded phone which means the phones IMEI number will be registered with Cingular. ")!

My summary: it's more the fact that the carriers know exactly what phone you are running (and the N91 is unsupported and unknown to North American carriers as was the N70 and 7610 for the most part) and know you are roaming so they can turn off your GPRS data based on that aaargh!

There is hope. The WiFi stack on the N91 is verrrrrrryyyyyyy 1.0. It crashes and is less than a 100% reliable. However it works well when it works. If every phone had WiFi and every place had WiFi (as do most of the places I hang out in like home, the Bryght offices, and Take 5) and if Skype or a SIP client works reliably over WiFi, then it won't matter that the carriers will only let me do voice calls (and not data with "unsupported" handsets like the N91). Lots of "ifs" but it's coming. Mark my words. 5 years from now making voice calls over WiFi will be painless and something everybody does not just some early adopters!

I don't know where I heard about this but the fact that the N91 (and the N70, 7610 and other phones without 850Mhz) doesn't support 850Mhz means that GPRS data doesn't work (although voice works fine!). Aaargh. Interesting that it worked fine in San Jose at NetSquared; I guess data is not carried on 850Mhz in San Jose.

I'm testing out the private beta of ShoZu 2.0 on my N70 tonight. The old stuff seems to work fine and I love ZuCasts which is an automatic downloader for selected video blogs (it would be much better if I could decide which videblogs I want rather than choosing from somebody else's list) for your mobile phone. Great stuff!

If I hadn't today received an N91 from the Nokia Blogger Relations program (thanks Andy and Nokia!), I'd watch Rocketboom on a regular basis now!

Unfortunately, ShoZu :-( doesn't yet run on the N91! More on the N91 and ZuCasts later.

I recorded a cheesy ringtone (see attached) on my friend Jeff Needham's vintage Minimoog Synth when I was staying at their Sunnyvale home last week for NetSquared. It's public domain and low quality :-) and should work on other Series 60 phones. Enjoy!

UPDATE: As always, Darla Mack has a more thorough Nokia Wireless Keyboard review.

Back in October 2005, on my way home from BarCamp Amsterdam, in a jet lagged stupor, I picked up a Nokia Bluetooth Keyboard aka the SU-8W. Maybe it was me, maybe it was the earlier version of the software, maybe it was my old grey market 7610, its old firmware, and its limited RAM but it did not work very well. The keyboard would disconnect and power down after a certain period of time and it did not reconnect when you rebooted the keyboard.

I am glad to say that it works much better with my N70. For work and fun (!) I monitor several servers. Now wherever I go, I carry my N70 and the SU-8W and monitor and tinker with the servers remotely using PuTTY (which allows me to login and work on my servers securely over SSH). It works really well (the keyboard automatically reconnects when you turn it on, unlike my 7610). Highly recommended.

Nokia, please introduce a series 60 phone with a 3 megapixel camera, optical zoom, macro mode and 640x480 video and a keyboard. I will pay for one of these bricks :-) (basically an N93 with a keyboard!) with my own money!

Check out my N70 running the Nokia open source port of Apache, Raccoon at: http://roland.tanglao.guest.at.openlaboratory.net/

I figure I'll leaving it running most of the time since I have an unlimited data plan.

Hacking python :-) Apache plugins in progress!

[Cross posted from MoMo Van]

Mobile Monday Vancouver May 2006 last night at Take 5 was an eclectic potpourri of topics and very lively conversation. Here are my highlights:

Matthew Snyder of Nokia is a former big wig of Nokia Search but has now moved on to other cool projects in Nokia. His current job is in Helsinki but he's based in Vancouver! Talk about a commute. He was a lively and fascinating conversationalist. Matthew demoed the Nokia/Yahoo Search app on his N70 together with some cool Canadian local integration which has not yet been released but I can't wait until it does. And I hope Matthew will start blogging!

Jim Pick showed off his 2 (!) Nokia 770s that he picked up when he was living in Berkley. The 770 is an awesome WiFi mini tablet (would be better if Gizmo and Skype were bundled!). I really wish it was sold in Canada. Anyways Jim who recently moved back to Vancouver has worked on the ARM port of Linux, Xen Virtualization and the Kaffe Java virtual machine. Jim's a great addition to the mobile community. Welcome back Jim!

Carlo of Upside Wireless discussed their SMS related work with the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale and plans for the IPIPI SMS engine

Duff Gardner of New Media BC's Mobile Muse project gave us the skinny about the upcoming mobile related talks at Vidfest (I wish there was a schedule for Vidfest 2006 that I could link to, but until then here's the Vidfest 2006 Speaker list) as well as some insight into the new World Centre for Digital Entertainment that New Media BC is working on.

Patrick Payne, ex of Mobile Operandi/Mophone/3GUPLOAD and Ericsson, was also a lively conversationalist. He spoke about the Wireless lab that will be part of the World Centre and the plans for taking MoMoVan to the next level after learning from the mother ship at the Mobile Monday Global Summit May 8th and May 9th, 2006 in Helsinki, Finland.

Speaking of the MoMo Summit, Steph Rieger (who along with Bryan has done 99% of the MoMoVan organizing, I just pontificate and blog :-) !) will be there with Patrick and is also hoping to learn from the MoMo Mothership. She and Bryan also discussed Flash Lite as well their ideas for a Bluetooth server.

I of course pontificated about the greatness of ShoZu (my ShoZu pics and videos) the N70 Nokia Blogger Relations program and how I was saving for my own N93 dream phone (3x optical zoom, 30fps video!)

John Goodall of LiteFeeds (a cool mobile RSS reader) made a brief appearance and then mysteriously left (work or family called I bet). Come back John!

Finally, we spent a long time discussing the next MoMoVan which will be Monday June 5th at a venue to be determined and what the next phase of MoMoVan looks like. If you are interested in helping shape and influence Mobile Monday Vancouver, it's never too late. Sign up for the Yahoo Grooup MoMoVan group and get your skin in the game! Looking for organizers, speakers, and sponsors! Looking forward to hearing from you!

See you in June!

[Cross posted automagically from blip.tv to test out the relatively new blip.tv cross posting to Drupal feature! Have I mentioned that blip.tv rocks? It does, they don't get the press of YouTube but they have many more features (like post via email, could we please have a video upload API that ShoZu can hook into) and are the service behind Geek Entertainment Televison and many other cool video blogs. Back to normal tech blogging, nothing to see here!]

Opera is free for the N70 and many other Series 60 phones! I was wrong in my previous post about this.

I would like to back up the contents of my MMC memory card on my N70 (in particular the Opera web browser that came with it), reformat the MMC (it appears to be corrupted because after I take 50 or so photos using the built-in camera app in sequence mode e.g. one of my Skyte sets, the phone displays a "Saving" alert box that doesn't disappear until I reboot it) and restore Opera. Is this possible (it should be but you never know)? Could somebody please point me to a Series 60 or N70 specific utility (I have firmware V 3.0546.2.3 18-11-05 RM-84) that does this? I thought about wiping the card and then re-installing Opera from scratch but Opera doesn't appear to be free so the copy I have must be under some sort of Nokia OEM license.

Downloading EQO for Mac OS X now to my Mac and to my N70. About time! More later! Still don't understand why a desktop client is needed; hope that this requirement goes away in time. Looking forward to using Skype on my N70 via EQO.

One thing I forgot in my N70 review is that the N70 (and all cameraphones for that matter) needs a tripod mount. Maybe it's my jittery hands but it would be great if I could somehow mount the N70 on a monopod or tripod for video blogging.

After taking over 1200 photos and 50 videos with the Nokia N70 camera phone review unit (courtesy of the N70 Nokia Blogger Relations program, thanks Andy!) since I received it on January 20, 2006, it's time for an N70 review.

Ignorance is bliss. If I hadn't recently tried out Robert Scales' new Sony Ericsson K750 or Harry's Nokia N90 (the guy who told me where to buy my grey market Nokia 7610), I would be 100% content with the N70.

BOTTOM LINE:

The Nokia N70 Cameraphone is a fantastic cameraphone as well as a fantastic cellphone. Except for the lack of a macro mode, the 2 Megapixel stills are great and there's lots of great toys like in camera digital cross processing. And the video mode is great! Good-bye postage stamp videos! What would I buy with my own money? Hard to say, but if I could afford it, I think it would be either the just released N91 (so I can try WiFi) or the N90 (for the the macro mode). If I didn't have the money, I'd definitely pay for the N70 because it's more than good enough and I can (mostly) live without a good macro mode.

<RANT>

For me, the camera combined with always on mobile internet access is my killer app (i.e. ShoZu is my killer mobile phone app) for a mobile phone and while the camera is fantastic on the N70 (in comparison to the crappy RAZR phone camera or almost any other cameraphone out there except for the forthcoming Sony Ericsson and Nokia 3 Megapixel phones with optical zooms e.g. N93), I pine for the camera of the K750 and N91 with their killer macro modes.

But you won't catch me switching to Sony Ericsson! For all my criticism of Series 60, it's really the only viable mobile platform out there at the moment. Sony is unusable and has no software (compared to Series 60) and no way to develop software easily (Series 60 has python! go Nokia go!) and I hate Sony's proprietary memory stick. Motorola is unusable (but cool looking in the case of the Razr) and also has no software to speak of and no way to develop software easily and don't get me started on Java on mobile phones :-) ! And BlackBerry is a non starter: no camera not to mention no (well OK very little compared to Series 60) software and no way to easily develop software! Sorry but I don't need "always on" email ) and if I did, Profimail, or heck even mobile Gmail would be good enough

</RANT>

LIKES:

DISLIKES:

In particular: IM+. Is it better than Agile Messenger?

From What's on my N90?.:

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I use my mobile phone (N70 thanks to the Nokia Blogger Relations program and my 7610 that I paid with my own money before that) to take short films so technically I qualify as a Piratopian and I take pictures of everything including what I am shopping for so I guess that makes me a High Street Hedonist. But since I don't have access to a 3G network (even though the N70 is a 3G capable phone), I don't strictly qualify!

From Smart Mobs: 3G mobiles 'change social habits'.:

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My trial N70 (thanks Andy and Nokia!) hangs seemingly randomly. I haven't reported it yet because I have been trying to figure out how to reproduce it reliably. Here's the sequence of events:

If I then reboot the phone, Shozu, the phone and the cursor keys work fine.

From The Obvious?: Nokia and a spinning colour wheel of death.:

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Doc quotes Paul Boutin as saying:

Nokia would never ship a phone with a spinning color wheel of death.

I wish they had because then at least I would have something to stare at when my new n70 hangs which it does on a wearyingly regular basis!

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