S60 Open to new features

An article in The Register reports that YouTube has blocked a small company, TinyTube, from making YouTube videos available on mobile phones, following YouTube's announcement of a deal with the US operator Verizon.

We've written several entries about transcoding and watching video for your S60 device: ffmpeg, SmartMovie, plus ways to watch YouTube and Google Video. I'm interested to hear from any of you who have run into limitations of your own with tools like these, due to network issues or your local operator's rules.

We're a bit spoiled here at Nokia; we don't usually need to worry about things like operator customer service and locked phones. That means, though, that we may lose sight of what ordinary mobile phone customers may run into in the "real world".

-Oren

You thought I was going to write about the iPhone, didn't you? No, there are plenty of other places to read about that piece of news. This entry reports on another announcement from CES, about the collaboration between Nokia and Vox, a new online blogging and media sharing service from blog pioneers Six Apart. Instead of requiring you to maintain separate accounts for your blog, photos and videos, Vox combines them all into a single site (and a single account).

The Vox uploader uses the same Atom protocol that Flickr, Lifeblog and other services use (see Hugo's comment here for details), so it works not only on the new N93i, but also on any Nseries phone that supports Flickr uploading from the Gallery - the screen shot here is from my N75.

[UPDATE January 18] Tommi reports that if you have a pre-Internet Edition N80, you can now update it officially to IE, and join the Atom uploading fun!

Any Voxers out there? Let me know how you like it!

-Oren

Happy New Year! A number of articles on the Web describe the use of mobile phones, and in particular the Nokia N93, as a tool for journalists and video blogging. Thanks to Darla and N93 WOM World for some of the pointers.

- Boston-area video blogger Steve Garfield reviews the N93 as a vlogging and journalism tool. Steve has issues with the file format: he wants the N93 to save files as native QuickTime H.264, instead of as MP4. Steve, until this gets to the platform, you can use VLC or another converter to convert the MP4 files to .MOV. The conversion is quick, since (AFAIK) the underlying video content does not change.

- Journalism professor Clyde Bentley is also impressed by the N93 as a tool for mobile jounalists, and also had some fun with the music and radio features as well.

- Nokia and the BBC are cooperating on a 'citizen journalism' project at the University of Brighton, where students will experiment with Nokia Nseries multimedia computers and Garmin Etrex GPS devices.

For the attention of readers in the UK: it looks like BBC Labs is looking for proposals in the area of mobile services (among others). They are "particularly interested in services that use mobile technology as a key part of the documentary experience. Proposals can either be for specific documentaries, or for technologies that could deliver documentary content in a new way across genres."

Have you broadcast (or seen) a mobile video on your local TV news, or community access cable channel?

-Oren