Nokia N900 meetup
The Nokia N900 meetup was a great success! Props to Matt for organizing the event & taking pictures, and to WOM World for the food/drinks…
Thanks to all the people who attended, including Tomomi, Dennis & his wife, Kevin, Brett of Pixelpipe, and the Mozilla crew :)
One of the most interesting aspect of the meetup was a demo of Fennec on the N900. Check the video above, and the other videos of the event after the break.
Update: Dennis provides a summary of the demo of Fennec on the N900.
Categories
tnkgrl Mobile: Tech that Matters 
Hi tnkgrl
I’m a fan of you two (Matt and you) since Im watching your “talking with tnkgrl” series on a regular basis.
I also check your blog at least twice a week and I’m always exited to find new footage, images and other content.
But, here is why I’m commenting on that video of yours:
You are so keen on taking high quality images with your smartphones, but almost every single one of your videos, be it unboxing videos or these ones, are of such a poor quality that I could barely watch them entirely.
This is not meant to be insulting or anything. I only felt that constructive criticism grounded in facts leads to improvements in this case. In fact I couldn’t see a thing on the screen of that N900 in the mozilla fennec demo video.
To be honest, I wouldn’t want to watch “talking with tnkgrl” if it was shot on your phone instead of Matt’s N95. The bottom line basicly is: Please use a phone with better video capturing capabilities or bring a real (HD) camcorder.
thanks and greetings from Germany,
(I apologize for my poor English)
Alex
btw: I met Julien Fourgeaud from Nokia PM in Germany some months ago where he showed me his pre release version of the N97 on a city festival. I couldn’t help remembering where Matt and you met him at the CTIA in Las Vegas.
@Alex,
We used to record the podcast on an N95 or similar cemeraphone from Nokia (640×480 MPEG4 at 30 fps), but there’s no auto-focus during video recording on these devices, which is a problem.
Now we generally record the podcast with a Samsung HD camcorder with continuous auto-focus. Unfortunately, Vimeo (and other sites) limits uploaded video size to 500 MB, so we have to (1) record in SD and (2) increase compression at rendering time, which results in decreased quality.
As for my unboxing videos (and my videos in general), I refuse to record using a camcorder. I’m a firm believer in using cameraphones to generate all the content on my blog (like I also do for my unboxing pictures).
As I mentioned, until recently, most cameraphones have lacked auto-focus for video, but the iPhone 3GS and the N900 have initial auto-focus (not continuous, however), which helps a lot – just check my recent unboxing videos.
I also generally stream most of my videos live on Qik instead of recording them and uploading them. This allows my followers on Twitter to get a random and exclusive glimpse at what’s coming on my blog.
My videos then get automatically uploaded from Qik to Youtube, in HQ mode. Of course streaming live video requires using more compression, but with the proper Youtube settings (“&fmt=18” HQ mode), and initial auto-focus, my videos now look decent.
The other advantage to live streaming is that there’s no editing or rendering stage, and I much prefer the spontaneity of it, and despite some limitations, quality is constantly improving.
Finally, the N900 Fennec demo was streamed live from my N86 (no auto-focus for video) to Qik. I chose that device for the event, because it’s the best cameraphone available to me for recording video in low light.
Without it, I would not have been able to capture this video so spontaneously, and I would have missed the opportunity to bring unique contents to my readers.