S60 Open to new features

It was an active week for our Ambassadors on Ovi Share. Lots and lots of pix --some mouth-watering, some funny, some downright gross. Check them out here. Our favorite was the meal packed in a Jedi lunchbox, an excellent effort all around:

We also wanted to give an honorable Mention to Nikhil Chawla for the smiley face (momma always told me not to play with my food) -- also check all his amazing run of "rice" pix here.

For next week, we want to see what kind of pets our Ambassadors have, or what kind of Animals live in your part of the world. Please tag your pix "animal6".

We also had a very active week for report submissions. Our favorite (a long one!) was from Daniel Ayala. Check it out:

Hi Ricky, Happy Friday.

Not that I have not been sharing with people about OVI Share, S60 and
Nokia, I just have not had a lot of time to type them up and send them
in.... Here is a particularly poignant one that resulted in some
really good uptake for the phones, the OS and the service!

Everyone in my extended family knows I am a phone fanatic and that I
often have phones and capabilities that are not available in the US
(either due to imports, carriers, etc). So last Saturday, in a
gathering leading up to Passover, out came the usual question about
which phone I was using this week, I pulled out my trusty N95-1. I
started showing it around and demonstrating the features of it
including its Mac compatibility, Flash in the browser, lots of open
apps that can be installed by the user and not require vendor
intervention (this topic came up when my uncle asked how it compared
to his iPhone). Finally we came upon the camera. I told them that
unless I was out with my Canon DSLR, I used my N95 for a day-to-day
camera. They did not believe that the quality was that good, so I
took a few shots and used the Share function to put them on Ovi
Share. We moved over to the family computer in the house we were
visiting and I showed them the 5MP quality and everyone was stunned.
The inevitable follow on question came very quickly... "How did you
get that up on the web so quickly?" A twinkle in my eye must have
clued my cousin off that there was something neat to show so she
commented, "I bet this is going to be cool." So, I took another photo
of my cousin's son, showed it on the screen of N95, clicked Send and
clicked Web Share. When the choice to select a service came up I
offered that you could use this integrated sharing software to post to
either Flickr or Ovi Share. I demonstrated Ovi Share and with a click
and a connect to the home WiFi, the picture was on the Ovi Share
website! I actually heard one person (and I can not determine who it
was) gasp when the site had the photo on it. At this point, I had
all 15 people (not including the 4 children under 6) around my
demonstration, and I wished I had my TV cables with me to make it
really visible to all gathered.

As I mentioned in my last report, I have a 4.5 month old son who has
a website with photos and videos on it. The videos are hosted on Ovi
Share. I told the group that I had one more neat feature using the
camera and Ovi Share and then I would get off my soapbox and we could
have dinner. I asked if anyone had been to Andrew's website recently,
and of course the answer was a resounding "yes." (What family would
not either visit, or pretend they visited your kids website, right?)
So I told them that the videos on the website were not from a
traditional video camera, but rather from my N95. Again, a level of
disbelief based on the quality of the videos they had seen. My
cousin, who is 4 months pregnant, seemed skeptical and interested, so
I gave another demonstration. I shot a 30 second video of my cousin
talking about her pregnancy and what she wanted to eat first after she
gave birth (in case you are interested, it was "a tuna melt and a
beer.") With the video shot, I again showed how quickly I could get
it posted to the web via the Share application on N95. 3 minutes
later, the video was available in my Ovi Share profile. I played it
and commented that any web browser should be able to play it without
plugins or external applications. The best comment was my cousin
again on the quality of the transfer and the speed of availability on
the website. The technical folks in the crowd also really loved the
ease and options of linking to or embedding the video into a blog,
website through the omnipresent URLs in the corner.

I also did a brief demonstration of the photo syncing capabilities in
the Share Online application between Ovi Share and the N95. This was
very well received as well, but my cousin indicated a desire to be
able to launch the videos from within that application, as opposed to
just seeing a static still image that represented a video. Either
that the still, when clicked, would launch a browser that lead
directly to the video on Ovi Share website, or that the transcoded
video could be stored on the phone like the sync'ed images are.

The last part of the conversation ended in 3 very happy people. My
two cousins, the one that is pregnant and the other who has a 1.5 year
old, are both GSM customers and were both interested in this union of
phone and camera. They both asked when I was next heading to Europe
and what the cost was, including the pain of the US Dollar exchange
rate. They were both overjoyed to hear that N95 was available at the
Nokia Flagship Store in the city (Chicago) and that it was at a
reasonable price, despite the exchange rate. I explained the
difference between the N95 and N95 8Gb.

To close out the story, I got a call from my pregnant cousin on
Tuesday to ask me if *I* Needed anything whilst she was at the Nokia
store in the City as she was going to buy an N95 to use as her phone
in-purse camera for the baby and use the Ovi Share service to post
them, since "it was so easy even her husband could do it." Yesterday
(Thursday), I got an email from my other cousin - the one that has the
1.5 yr old - and she had ordered an N95 8Gb online and was so happy to
have a way to post videos that "did not involve YouTube."

Regards,
Dan Ayala

Thanks Dan, keep 'em coming! Tune in next Tuesday for the "Top 10" Ambassador list. Until then, happy WoM'ing!