Tag: n9
Nokia’s Lumia 800 vs N9
Posting it here since I seem to be referring to this chart quite often. Will update it with the Lumia 900 as soon as more details are available.
About Nokia N9’s Photo Sharing
The N9 has the ability to take excellent photos of various sizes and resolutions up to 8 megapixels. It even has built-in white balance adjustments, filter options, as well as exposure and ISO settings which is more than can be said about built-in camera applications on other mobile platforms. There is little to complain about the N9’s photographic credentials. Except when it comes to sharing the photos to the Internet.
The N9 actually has a decent selection of sharing options. Upon opening the menu to share items within the Gallery app, your next step would be to select the photos you wish to share and then tap the Share button at the bottom of the screen. You are then presented with a list of sharing options which include Facebook, Flickr, MMS, email, bluetooth, and NFC. But there’s a couple of things overlooked.
No sharing to Twitter
This is where the first problem appears. Twitter is among the most popular places to share photos yet it’s not available as an option. Sure, Facebook and Flickr are two of the most popular places for photo sharing but Twitter is a widely popular place as well, so why is the option missing?
I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt and accept that it may have been overlooked or set aside in the need to ship public release versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the N9’s software so I would very much like to see this remedied in the next major release.
The workaround, which is selecting the photo from within the built in Twitter app, while acceptable, does not work very well. There is also no other Twitter app available for the N9 unless you consider the poorly made Twimgo as an option, but I digress.
When selecting the photo attachment option in the tweet composition screen, the photo library that appears takes you to the oldest photos, located on top of the list, which is the reverse of what the actual Gallery app displays. Did somebody at Nokia miss a memo?
This means if you have hundreds of photos in the gallery, you’ll have to scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, all the way to the bottom to get to your most recent photo before you can share it on Twitter. This is ridiculous.
You are more likely to share on Twitter the most recent photo you took, instead of the oldest, so the image gallery within the Twitter app should immediately show you the latest photos instead.
No image compression options
Bandwidth is a limited resource on mobile connection and sharing images to the internet can be quote a taxing activity depending on the quality of the connection. Given that a large part of the planet doesn’t have stable and unlimited mobile data access, it’s a surprise that the N9 does not offer image compression options.
As it stands, full resolution photos taken by the N9’s camera can yield photos with the size of up to 3 megabytes each. Without web optimized image compression, one photo will take a very long time to upload, not to mention when there are several photos being uploaded.
It is truly a surprise that the N9 was allowed to ship without being able to alter the compression rate of the photos it takes when sharing them online.
When Nokia Music makes sure that the songs it makes available for download to each mobile device is delivered with a bitrate of less than 96kbps, far less than the expected standard of 128kbps quality, simply to speed up the download, it’s a wonder that the company neglected to make the necessary file size adjustment to allow for faster photo uploading. After all, mobile data upload speeds are generally set much slower than download speeds.
Why not take photos at a lower resolution, say 3 megapixels? That would waste the capability of the camera to take better looking photos now wouldn’t it?
It’s entirely possible to take a photo at high resolution, then downsample that to a much lower file size but still maintain much of the depth, sharpness, and quality of the image. Look at sports photos for example, or stock photos online.
Minor but Irritating
Having said that, these are relatively minor issues that probably should have been addressed before the device shipped but since they’re software related, they can be fixed with an upcoming update.
Of course, this would bring up the debate of what features could you ship it without? Since Nokia chose to ship it with Twitter and photo sharing, it really ought to have implemented these options. At least have the image gallery in the Twitter app reflect the actual Gallery app, instead of presenting the reverse.
As for the lack of direct sharing to Twitter, perhaps it’s not as egregious as not having copy/paste function built-in.
One wonders though if Nokia will address these at all, given that it has moved on to Windows Phone. Since the N9 is still a current product and Nokia has a history of strong product support however, it’s probably not too far fetched to expect these changes being brought in.
Nokia rolls out software update for N9, bricks mine and others’
Nokia is rolling out its first update for the N9 and as I wrote about it the other week, it’s a pretty big update for those who received their N9s with the stock 1.0 software.
When I received my N9 from Nokia Indonesia, it already came with version 1.1 (20.2011.40_2_PR_005) which is newer than the one that was shipped with the initial batch of N9s. I saw a couple of units with v. 34 instead of the v. 40_2 that I got. The public update that was rolled out earlier today is designated 40_4 which brings four more new features over the 40_2. I listed the differences in the previous post.
Around 11 am GMT+7, a notice popped up on my N9 letting me know that there was an update for the phone, so I proceeded to back up my phone and was about to run the update when I decided to tweet about it and soon after was told by a friend not to run the update because her N9 had gone kaput after she ran it. Another friend also ran the update and is now holding a bricked N9.
The update came in at 11MB instead of the 218MB that was announced earlier. As it turns out, the larger size had been for the entire OS instead of the update. Having gone through Over-The-Air update smoothly for my iPhone, I placed my faith in Nokia, despite the warnings. Turns out I should have trusted her. Now my N9 is stuck in a boot loop and I won’t be able to use it until Nokia gets it fixed.
The comments in the Nokia Conversations blog swayed my decision to update because there had been very positive feedbacks for the updates but I overlooked the likelihood that they were updating from an older version of the OS than mine.
Now, I have to wait for my contacts at Nokia Indonesia to get back to me so I can have it restored to operational status.
[update]
A full restore from scratch apparently would get the phone working again but I may lose all photos, songs, videos, and apps I’ve stored in it. I’m heading to Nokia’s office to get it fixed.
I’ve got photos and videos transferred to iPhoto, and some of the songs are from iTunes but I’ve downloaded a few dozen from Nokia Music. The apps and songs may need to be redownloaded. This would be a big meh.
Nokia rolls out software update for N9, bricks mine and others’
Nokia’s in depth documentary on Lumia 800
Yes, it’s the same kind of polished marketing fluff that Apple and a few other companies produce, but that’s the point. It’s polished, and they talk as passionately as engineers, executives, designers, and other nervous non-actors can about loving their work.
via GigaOM
While this is about the Lumia 800, a lot about the hardware could probably be said about the N9 which I really love, after all, the two phones share an identical design with slight tweaks in a few places.
I do hesitate a little about openly recommending the N9 given the limited availability of the applications as well as the unique approach to its use but I can say that I’m enjoying the different ways to use a mobile device. I love it when somebody comes along and offers a fresh take on common activities and the N9 is as fresh as it gets.
I’m genuinely excited about Nokia’s future having seen and now own the N9. This is a fresh start for the company struggling to maintain its position in the rapidly changing world of mobile phones.
Though I’m apprehensive about the deal with Microsoft, having used Windows Phone 7 for about a month earlier this year, I can say that it’s really not a bad piece of software from the consumer point of view. I like how it delivers a truly fresh approach to the user interface, focusing on text and panels rather than icons and heavy graphics. Microsoft’s approach to Metro takes away many of the fluff and shows just the important elements.
Having gone back to the familiar iOS interface, I miss the spartan look of Windows Phone but what can I say, iOS feels a lot like home. It’s what I’ve been used to since 2008 and it’s clearly much more polished and mature.
Today, I use both the N9 as well as an iPhone 3GS. Having owned an iPhone 4 for three months, I never had the intention to upgrade to the 4S. Despite the highly publicized and clearly impressive Siri, it doesn’t fully work outside of the United States and I’d rather wait until the next iteration. Without Siri, the camera is the remaining major upgrade from the 4 and I’m currently quite happy using the cameras on the 3GS as well as the N9.
Nokia’s N9 gets its first update
If you’re one of the early adopters of the Nokia N9, get ready for an update. Nokia has just announced an over the air software update that’s being rolled out within the next few days and should be completed within two weeks.
The update weighs in at 218MB so you would want your N9 to be within range of a fast wifi connection and plugged in to a power source. The process supposedly could take up to 40 minutes in which your phone would not be usable until it’s completed and you’re advised to back it up beforehand.
The current version of MeeGo on the N9 is the PR 1.1 (20.2011.40-2_PR_005), at least on the device I’m holding. The update will be designated 40-4 and is said to bring parity to the N950 developer device.
A number of features are listed on Nokia’s developer blog but it seems rather odd because some of them are already available on my device which I picked up right after Nokia World, namely:
- Music controls on the lock screen
- Multi-language Swype keyboard
- Default swipe down to close an app
- NFC tag reading
- Photo and video shoot with color filter
- Notifications on the standby screen
That’s six of the ten listed new features. What’s left?
- Noise canceling, (can’t say because I don’t use the N9 to make calls)
- More powerful multitasking (it’s kind of slow right now)
- Faster MfE (I have no idea what MfE means)
- Multiple smaller improvements to the OS (can’t tell what these are)
If you’re an N9 owner, have you got those features already or are you looking forward to have them?
AuliaSays 