Dan’s Blog (2.0)

On my recent trip to Greece with my wife to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary, I made myself one promise: I would not use the Web for the whole week. By and large, I kept this promise, however I was not completely off the grid. While we were island hopping, I was snapping pictures with my N73 and using Zonetag to send them up to FlickR. The results are available here.

ZoneTag is a nifty downloadable application and service, developed by Yahoo! Research, which allows you to (among other things) upload images directly to FlickR from your camera phone. Of course, there are plenty of applications that allow you to do this, but the ZoneTag difference is that by using the CellID, and cross-referencing this against a database of CellIDs that they maintain, ZoneTag can accurately geotag your photos even if your device doesn’t have a a GPS built in. ZoneTag also learns CellID locations through users using the system and telling it their location. It’s “leveraging collective intelligence.”

Anyway, apart from being a bit of geeky fun, there was a method to this madness. Publishing these photos allowed our kids (being looked after by my saintly mother and sister) to keep track of our travels. It was like being able to send postcards instantaneously. And unlike MMS, sending an image with Zonetag does not compress / reduce the images to the Nth degree - the original images with their original detail are sent up. Now, granted this is the Greek islands and you can pretty much just wave a camera around snapping randomly and get great pictures, but I actually think these turned out pretty well. My only complaint (a Nokia complaint, not a Zonetag one) is the high level of compression (which I’ve complained about before) and some softness in the corners (which to a certain extent can’t be avoided with small lenses, but I would have expected more from a “Carl Zeiss” lens. (Carl must be spinning in his grave.)

I was also trying out a new product from Yahoo’s Berkeley labs - Zurfer. Zurfer is a Java application that allows you to browse FlickR images. The Yahoo! labs guys call it Zonetag’s “little brother.” It’s got a slick and responsive user interface that’s simple but also powerful in its task: enabling you to browse photos. You can browse your own photos, your contacts’ photos or (more interestingly) photos around you.

What would I like to see more of from these guys? For starters, I’d like to be able to upload pictures after the fact, and in batch, instead of having to go through the process for each and every photo I take when that photo is taken. I’d also like the ZoneTag UI to be built more into the camera/viewer functions (send to ZoneTag should be another option under “send” when I’m viewing images). As for Zurfer, I really like the concept, and it was fun to use, but I wonder if this couldn’t be built inside Nokia’s Series-60 browser as a Web App and thereby spare people the hassle of downloading yet another app to their phone. Then again, if it were inside the browser I wouldn’t have been able to keep my promise.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 20:50 under Travel, mobile 2.0
Tags: Greece, N73, Nokia, Yahoo!Labs, ZoneTag, Zurfer

4 Comments

Well, it’s been about two weeks since I wrote gushingly about the Nokia N73 on this page. Has the bloom come off the rose? Well - in some small ways, yes, and I will detail those here, but in the main I am still very impressed with this device.

My biggest pet peeve is picture quality. For a device that prominently displays the fact that it sports a “Carl Zeiss” lens and a 3.2 megapixel sensor, I would expect higher quality images. The problem seems to be in the software. Even at its highest image quality setting, the JPEG compression is jacked way up. A typical highest-quality image out of the phone comes in at around 500k. My old 2-megapixel Powershot S100 used to produce images around the same size, for comparison. Considering you can now buy 1GB cards for this thing, I think it ought to be possible to squeeze some higher quality photos out of it. The auto white balance is also pretty wonky. My sense is that the sharpening algorithm is also jacked way up but it’s kind of difficult to tell with all the compression artifacts in every picture. It also takes a while for the camera to get ready to take pictures and there is too long a delay between the time you depress the button and when the picture is actually taken - resulting in many missed shots, especially when your subjects are fast-moving children. Don’t get me wrong: for a camera phone, it is pushing the envelope. But Nokia really markets this phone as a digital camera as well as a phone and in my view it needs some tweaking in order to make good on this promise.

My second area of frustration is with the Bluetooth support. I had expected some improvement over the N70, but unfortunately I find it still craps out quite often. The only remedy is to go in to the control panel and turn Bluetooth off and on again. This usually fixes the problem, but when you’re trying to make or receive a call on the go, or connect to the Internet to quickly send/receive email, this can be very frustrating.

Both of these are software issues so they could potentially be addressed by firmware updates.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 19:38 under Mobility
Tags: cameraphone, N73, Nokia

14 Comments

It’s been a day since I’ve taken delivery of my brand-spanking new Nokia N73 (pictured at right). And I have to say, I am pretty impressed. It’s not that it’s some huge revolution in usability and design. It isn’t. It’s a step up from the N70 (pictured at left) which I’ve been using for a few months. But what a step up! It is just a little bit better in almost every aspect of operation and use. Build quality is better. Industrial design is better. It’s lighter. It’s smaller — not by much but just enough that it now fits comfortably in my pocket where the N70 was uncomfortably bulgy. It’s balanced and has a flat bottom — it doesn’t sit precariously on the desk like the N70 did. The materials it’s made out of seem higher quality — maybe it’s just the lack of (or at least minimization of) finger-print-showing chrome accents. Its battery lasts longer. It doesn’t get as hot as the N70 did during long calls. The camera features a real (glass, auto-focus) lens and takes measurably better pictures (though still not up to the quality level of dedicated digital cameras, they are more than usable for most on-line applications and could even be suitable for decent, if small, prints). The lens cover is easier to slide back. The screen is higher resolution and brighter. On the N70, you had to wait a few seconds for things like the call register or address book to come up. This delay is gone on the N73, making the experience of using it as a phone much much much less painful. The PC sync software was a snap to install and get working and synced my 800+ Outlook contacts very quickly over Bluetooth. In short, it’s just that little much better in about every single way and that adds up to a real difference in terms of usability, operation and, yes, sexiness. To borrow a catch-phrase from Oldsmobile, this is not your father’s Series-60.

Special mention has to go to the Web browser (which is built WebCore and JavaScriptCore that Apple’s Safari is built on top of). It is really really good (with a couple of caveats, see below). The browser operates like a PC browser, complete with a little pointing hand cursor that you move around the screen with the 4-way rocker switch. The hand moves semi-intelligently from link to link and, because the screen is smaller than most Web pages, you get a zoomed-in view which shifts around as you move the cursor. You can get a page overview and then zoom into the part of the page you’re interested in. And when you go “back” or “forward” a page, you get neat little page thumb-nails which animate back and forth until you find the page you’re looking for. The result is an amazingly usable Web experience, even for pages that do not adapt for mobile browsers (a bit more on that later). Nokia also recently open-sourced a significant portion of their own work on this browser, which should spur yet more innovation around this platform.

My minor qualms list:

• The built-in web upload application for photos (which is supposed to provide out-of-the-box Flickr integration) did not work. It kept rejecting my username and password and provided no easy way to diagnose the problem. I downloaded ShoZu which worked right away (although ShoZu didn’t have the N73 in its list of supported phones).
• The Nokia S-60 Web Browser works on most sites, but things falls down on things like drag-and drop Ajax applications. Nothing you can do here unless you could add a bluetooth mouse (which you can’t, and in any case that’s hardly “one-handed operation.”)
• The Web browser does not appear to support CSS media queries (or at least doesn’t load stylesheets marked for media type “handheld”). So if I go through the trouble to create special CSS for small-screen devices, this is work is lost on the S-60 Web browser. I think this is a big problem and I hope they fix it in future releases.
• There are two browsers — one for “Wap” and one for “Web.” They even share the same (or a very similar) icon. This doesn’t make sense.
• Final browser nit: when I tried to demonstrate how cool the browser was to my wife by bringing up IMDB while we were out at the pub to answer a question on so-and-so’s filmography … the phone crashed. Oops! It hasn’t done the same since but still — some points knocked off for bad timing.
• Settings are difficult to change. It took me the better part of 20 minutes to figure out how to turn off keypad beeps. That’s a lot of beeps. (It’s in “Profiles”).
• The Lifeblog application holds a lot of promise, but seems to be limited to working with the Typepad software. I would love to use it, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work with Blogger.
• It takes yet another kind of micro-flash-card format (MiniSD), which means the card I bought for the N70 is now useless.

That’s about it for now. The long and short of it is — great device. As for the Web Browser — it’s a real innovative leap for mobile browsing. Like any 1.0, there are some problems, but Nokia re clearly on the right track here. My wife has yet to be convinced, though.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 22:12 under Mobile Web, Mobility
Tags: N73, Nokia, webkit

31 Comments