Nokia N900 in Amsterdam

I created another video (I previously announced Maemo summit video). This video is also from the Maemo summit trip, but features more about the Nokia N900 Maemo 5 user interface - if you haven't tried it yourself, it is something unlike anything you have used before, in a positive way - I liked this chosen Maemo-5 UI concept from the very beginning and I was happy to see it becoming reality. Try N900 in a Nokia flagship store or somewhere else if you are still thinking and not already an owner of the device.

The Bounce Evolution, desktop and browser were all filmed in a hotel room in Amsterdam. Then there are few scenes from the city and new scenes from the Maemo summit - featuring possibly some of those who were missing from the previous Maemo summit video. I intended to use the footage in another video, but I did not finish it. I found the reuse for it on this video. I hope you like it. The UI videos are not cut, just trimmed - meaning that what you see is what you get.

The video can be watched in Youtube in the following URL:

Nokia N900 in Amsterdam

Credits:
Video: Karoliina Salminen
Music: Karoliina Salminen
Music remix: Juan Manuel Avila

Few words about the music remixer artist: Juan is from Fin-music mailing list - it was a virtual gathering place a group of hobbyist musicians (which were specialized to electronic music and who almost all wanted to do some Jean-Michel Jarre) used to have while they were gathering around exceptionally talented artist that called himself Fin (Christian Worton). We were sharing our creations with each other and giving feedback and sharing ideas and tried to sound like Fin (Fin sounded superb by default). Juan was one of the active members on the list and luckily now Facebook has connected this group of fellows again. Juan also composes his own music (I have few of his CDs he have given to me) but he is also excellent in doing remixes. Many thanks for him for making a remix of the Maemo summit opening soundtrack (please see my maemo summit opening video if you want to hear the original to compare, you can find it on youtube, by looking the list of my videos, it should be there one of the first ones on the list as it is a quite recent video of mine).

Maemo Summit 2009 video

I recorded quite a bit video footage at Maemo Summit 2009 which was held in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I did not have presentation there (because my proposal did not get approved (clutter app development)), but I recorded what the others were talking about, the people attending, the happenings around the Maemo summit 2009 and the place, Amsterdam.

I have been editing the footage for a quite some time now and finally decided to release the first my video about Maemo Summit despite I have only clips from perhaps 1/5 of the scenes I was filming at the summit. It is three and half minutes and features 720p HD video and music. No speeches, just audiovisual experience to deliver some feelings from Maemo summit 2009.

Be sure to click the HD and full screen buttons for a better viewing experience.

Maemo Summit 2009 Video

The video was shot with Canon EOS 5D Mark II + 24-105 4L IS USM at 1080p30 and edited afterwards with Final Cut Pro and then downgraded to 720p30 for Youtube. I hope you enjoy the short video. Please give me also feedback. Comments on my blog are enabled for the first two weeks after the release of the blog entry.

New ring tone your new Nokia N900: Superlectro

You have got new N900 but having hard time which ring tone to choose for your device and the songs you have are not suitable length and are not looping? Think no more, here is the solution:

I created a new ring tone intended to be used with the Nokia N900. The style is electronic and I clipped it so that it (almost perfectly) loops, so when you set it as ring tone and it continues to play, it continues from beginning (almost) seamlessly. The song sounds surprisingly loud on the device, thus justifying that it can be used as ring tone.

You can download the song from my mikseri.net page:
Direct download link

If you have any difficulties with the above direct link, please try going to this page and then download the song manually by clicking the download link:
Superlectro Ringtone Song page on mikseri.net

Click "Lataa mp3" link to download the file in case the page represents itself in Finnish to you and if you don't talk Finnish.

I will upload the file later to katix.org server, but it is not there yet. It is likely to appear later to url: http://www.katix.org/karoliina/media -folder.

To install the ring tone to Nokia N900 device, do this (it is very easy, but steps are presented here just in case you are new to the new unconventional UI paradigm of the Maemo5):
1. either download the song with the device browser directly or if you use your computer, first copy the mp3-file to the device.
2. Go to Settings
3. Select Profiles applet
4. You see page with Silent and General -buttons. It is pannable. Scroll (pan) it down. Ring tone button comes visible.
5. Press the Ring tone button to choose the ring tone.
6. Click Add on the right hand bottom side of the screen
7. Go up from Audio clips folder since it is most likely not in the audio clips folder with the button located to the left hand top side of the dialog.
8. Point your ring tone mp3 file (you need to point the file, you can't choose Artist/Album/whatever)
9. If you did it right, the new ring tone starts to play
10. Move the volume slider of the ring tone to maximum (because this is hifi-recording it is not _that_ loud for the little speakers of the N900, even if it is loud with my terms).
11. Click save and you are done!

Next time somebody calls you, you have personalized a ring tone not everybody else has, unless everybody else downloads my ring tone also of course. I hope you like it and have fun with it. You can use this of course with any device, but I have only tested it on N900 and with the speakers of N900 it sounds quite good to me (irritation level with this tune is low + volume level is good (=loud enough to be heard from pocket in a somewhat noisy environment) when it is set to max).

Maemo Summit 2009 Opening Video on Youtube

Maemo Summit 2009 Opening video on Youtube

My computer just finished uploading the opening of 2009 Maemo Summit to Youtube. It features the N900 video and Peter Schneider's welcome. If you see embedded version of this video, please make sure you click the Youtube logo to see it in HD (after clicking HD, you can click full screen to get the most benefit out of it).

The video Peter Schneider plays features my music. The video content is from two Nokia N900 videos that I remixed together. I edited the soundtrack of this video so that the music part mixes sound from the event (same thing but poorer quality) and the original soundtrack so that the music has higher fidelity than what you could record on the N900 hall on Maemo Summit at Westgasfabrik. It was pretty hard to sync the two soundtracks together. I am not so advanced user with Final Cut Pro yet and it involved lots of handwork to do it (zooming and looking the waveforms closely on Soundtrack Pro).

Unfortunately I was kind of busy with releasing this (since people seem to be eager to see the videos now rather than later), so editing and filtering is not best possible and there is for example some visible noise on it. The film was filmed with Canon EOS 5D mark II with ISO setting (automatically turned into that) 25600 (the very high ISO explains why there is some noise in the video - in same conditions my old video camera would have turned almost black and white and greenish and would have produced quite low resolution video). The video was shot in the P-mode that automatically sets the ISO etc. values. I propably should have shot the video in the M-mode instead but I had too little time to set it up with the M-mode before the show started.

I do all filming nowadays with the Canon EOS 5D mark II, and have stopped using video cameras. The lens used was Canon EF 24-105 f 4 L IS USM.

Anyway, have fun with the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqsMAkKrXJ8.

Hands on with the new amazing Nokia N900

There has bee a lots of interest around this new device and the Maemo 5 operating system. Lots of positive comments and then I have read some comments where people doubt that the transitions would be just some flash animations and not a real thing (which of course is not true). Well, this is a OpenGL hardware accelerated Maemo device, and all you see is real. Quim Gil just posted on Twitter a link to a new video showing how the Maemo UI works, if you had doubts, you can put the doubt aside and see by yourself. The user experience is slick and beautiful.

You can find the video from here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrYqemylpIo

In my opinion, the UI experience on the Maemo 5 has improved greatly over what it used to be and also over the competition. It is really pleasant to use and there are not so many things that would be annoying. There certainly is lots of wow, and this kind of shows the innovation these days is occuring in the mobile space rather than on desktop, desktop environments are already lagging behind and the transitions on these UIs are not so practical they are in Maemo where they are all well thought and well implemented and not just random eye candy and special FX without purpose. Maemo 5 really rocks on this segment.

There is also an article about hands on experience on N900. Slashgear is reporting from Nokia World conference. There is both video and lots of good pictures included. This shows how the device looks like rather than the UI. The video I mentioned above is better showing how the UI functions.

http://www.slashgear.com/nokia-n900-hands-on-0254743/

And here is yet another hands on video. This is also very good:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr-BF0Gs0_E

And here is the replacement for a gaming console.

http://twitpic.com/g6smv

The Nokia N900 can be used as accelerometer equipped controller and connected to a TV. Hint for game developers: Here is the great platform to start developing games. The platform supports full OpenGL ES 2.0 and a OpenGL-ES game does not even need to care that much what Maemo version it will run on, Maemo 5, Maemo 6, and the GL is standard. It is not a bad long term investment to invest on Maemo. The N900 has a capable graphics accelerator (for this small mobile device) as can be seen from the Bounce game and from also the UI which heavily relies on the accelerated 3D graphics. The capacity of the device is great - it has plenty of RAM and there is plenty of flash too on the user's home directory. And if the RAM would not be enough, there is also virtual memory like on any modern operating system nowadays. The games don't need to be that simple and amateurish anymore "mobile games", I am quite confident that anything that has been done for Wii could be done for this device, in other words, this could be used as a serious gaming device despite that is not what it was primarily targeted for (as it is Internet device really). But like computers, there are many uses for the single device. Also, the device can be always connected, so massive multiplayer games would be superb on this. Looking forward to try some serious 3rd party games in the future! Hey Austin, if you read this, please port the X-plane, I want it.

Nokia announced Maemo 5 based N900

Our secret N900 "The Device" is no longer so secret as it just got announced. I can't though show yet my own videos about it (I will post them some time later, so stay tuned), but there is already plenty of announced material that might interest you. Others have already announced links to them I am sure. I really love our device and I am sure you want it too!

New site, lots of cool pictures and information:
http://maemo.nokia.com

There is a video in Youtube (not my video, but cool nonetheless):
N900 interaction documentary

I recommend watching the above video if you are eager to see (I am sure you are) how our completely renewed fancy UI works. It is very cool and it works!