S60 Open to new features

The N82 has recently been awarded the Best Mobile Imaging Device for 2008 by the Technical Image Press Association (the largest photo and imaging press association in Europe).

I recall that the N95 was also given the same honour last year, and just found out that the N80 was in fact the winner of the same award in 2006!

A pretty neat and impressive hat-trick by Nokia and S60. Let's look forward to bagging the next three, or perhaps a hat-trick of hat-tricks?

But more importantly than the awards is to discover and appreciate what our devices are capable of. For the past several months, I have been enjoying the spectacular winning entries from the Nokia Creative N95 Photo Awards at James Burland's Nokia Creative Blog. I'm eagerly awaiting the results from the new series of Nokia N82 Photo Awards.

Congratulations to my co-author Kevin and the N82 product team! (Now, where can I get my hands on one of these fantastic imaging devices? ;))

- Carol.

As many of you that attended the Q&A session during the N82 True Stories launch event probably remember, one of the questions asked was: "Is 'Geotagging' photos directly supported?" The answer by the N82 Product Manager was: "'Geotagging' for the N82 will be available in Q1 2008 through a firmware update." The promise was made and will be kept; I'm excited to share the word that this feature will be available in the next firmware release for N82. In the new firmware GPS Location Saving can be turned On or Off directly from the Camera Settings.

When will the new firmware be available?
Work on Location Tagging is progressing well, some other new features are also being added (that I can't talk about yet). What I can say is that the new firmware is on target for Q1 but I can't say when exactly it will be available. To get ready for GPS Location Tagging I compiled a couple tips below to help improve your GPS Location Tagging experience.

Tips to help improve your GPS Location Tagging experience:
Tip 1. GPS Location Tagging works best outdoors or in areas with a clear view of the sky (where the GPS satellites are). This might be self explanatory for some people, but for those of you new to Location Tagging it's an important thing to know.

Tip 2. If you use Flickr to share your photos and you want to show the Location where the photo was taken then you need to turn on the "Import EXIF location data" feature on your Flickr account. How do you do this?
Simply log into your Flickr account, then visit this page http://www.flickr.com/account/geo/exif/?from=privacy
Click Yes, then Click Save. Now when you upload a new photo that contains Location Tags, Flickr will show where the photo was taken. By default Flickr sets this feature Off on all accounts.

Tip 3. If you don't have an N82 but you have a GPS enabled S60 3rd edition device, or if you just can't wait until the new firmware is released for your N82 check out the Beta Nokia Location Tagger application available as a free download from Nokia Beta Labs. The Nokia Location Tagger is a stand alone beta application that can give you a good idea how Location Tagging works. However, the Location Tagging User Interface that will be in the next firmware release for N82, will be will be simpler and thus easier to use.

Questions? Post them in the comments.

On an unrelated topic I've joined a group blog on the Forum Nokia Blogs, called Forum Nokia Web Talks, where I post about web and internet related topics as well as occasional entries on new S60 applications. If you find my blog entries here on S60 blogs interesting also check out my posts on Forum Nokia Blogs.

There is a client update for the Nseries Share Online app for uploading media from Gallery to Flickr (and Vox). To get it, you can go to the Nokia Sharing & blogging site and click on "Download", or straight to the Download page.

This version 2.0 of the Share Online client now allows account creation with regular Flickr/Yahoo login, introduces tagging support including an on-device tag database, plus a few other improvements.

Note that when you install the update, the existing account settings for Flickr or Vox will be overwritten. (The unofficial Twango settings which I added to my N95 were gone as well.)

- Carol.

[ Source: Nokia Nseries-support @ Flickr ]

Reading Carol's recent post about FlickrVision reminded me of a great Flash Lite application that can be used to search and view Flickr photos on S60 devices that have Flash Lite support.

The application was created by Justin Everett-Church that has been working with Flash for many years. You can Download the Flash Lite Flickr Search application here on Justin's Flash Blog and copy it to your S60 device then search for any photos you like. Photos are shown four at a time in a nice slide show style. Many S60 3rd edition devices come pre-installed with Flash Lite support. Be sure to check this extensive list to see what devices have Flash Lite support pre-installed (they need to add the N95 with pre-installed Flash Lite support).

There's something mesmerizing about watching random pictures pop up across your computer screen. I'm sure many of you know about Flickrvision - a mashup of Flickr and Google Maps to render photos in real time across a world map. (There's also Twittervision, which does the same with Twitter and Google Maps.) However these sites are not exactly mobile friendly.

Dave Troy, who brought us both the abovementioned mashups, has now released Flickrvision Mobile. It is quite spartan compared to its non-mobile counterpart, with a one-line text description of the location accompanying the picture, rather than full geographical visualization. But it achieves its purpose well -- I was enthralled for several minutes when I first loaded it up on my Nokia E62.

Here's a video of Flickrvision Mobile running on the N95 and E62. The photos load more quickly on the N95 because it's using a WLAN connection, whereas E62 is connected via EGPRS. Video clip recorded with N93.

Flickrvision Mobile works great in the S60 browser. For some reason it doesn't work with Opera Mini. And while it's a fun idea, I wonder how long the fascination will last? Can you think of some uses for it other than killing time? :)

- Carol.

[ Source: mTrends ]

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

There are certainly plenty of ways to upload your photos to Flickr and other sites directly from your phone, and plenty of evidence that cameraphone users (Nokia cameraphone user in particular) are taking advantage of these tools. But what are the real numbers? Thanks to the public Flickr API, we can find out. I started collecting some statistics a few weeks ago, using some desktop Python scripts. The numbers are quite impressive: read on to see the details.

The latest Forum Nokia Pro newsletter included an announcement about the Manhattan Story Mashup, an urban storytelling game, where players will run around Manhattan with Nokia N80 cameraphones, taking photos that illustrate words in stories written by other players. The play happens on September 23rd, and sounds like fun!

The game was organized by the Nokia Research SensorPlanet project, which explores "large-scale wireless sensor networks". The game was designed by Ville Tulos, a researcher at Helsinki University, and Jürgen Scheible, Forum Nokia Champion and huge proponent of Python for S60. Ville wrote the Python client that is at the heart of the game software. The client consists of 1100 lines of code, and communicates with a Python server using a JSON protocol.

Jukka is still on holiday, but he still emailed to tell me about this review from All About Symbian of the new version of ShoZu for S60 3rd Edition phones. If you're not familiar with ShoZu, it's a simple, reliable app that lets you upload your cameraphone photos to Flickr or to other photo sharing sites or blogs. I have used this for a while on 2nd Edition phones (it's a great complement to the N90!), so the 3rd Edition port was good news (or perhaps bad news; I already spend way too much time playing with Flickr).

In related 3rd Edition news, several NSeries models have Flickr uploading integrated directly into the Gallery application. This works well, but does not let you add tags to the photo before sending as ShoZu does. Nokia Lifeblog is also available for some 3rd Edition phones, and will post to any blog that uses TypePad.