Learning by Doing » Nokia

I signed up for the Ovi Ambassador program.

Mr. Gunn — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:50:36 +0000

The main thing it needs is to pull in your existing content/activity, a la profilactic.

Slick is a good IM app for Symbian S60v3 devices

Mr. Gunn — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:36:10 +0000

It’s free and runs great on my N75, uses little data and is only 721K. It supports ICQ, Jabber, AIM, MSN, Yahoo and GTalk. I can confirm that the ICQ, Jabber, and GTalk protocols work. The ICQ protocol is difficult to test yourself, because it only lets you be logged in one place, so you can’t send a message from your desktop client to your phone, but it retrieved my contacts fine and showed who was online properly, so I assume that works too. Another nice thing about it is that it uses a small font, so the threaded message view is actually useful.

Slick is simple, fast, and functional. Eqo take note.

If you’d like VOIP functionality also, you can try Gizmo5, but I haven’t used it and the other two I tried, Eqo and Fring, were failures. Fring might be fine if all you’re doing is VOIP and using Slick for IM, but will probably run your battery down even faster.

Qik is pretty freaking awesome: A review

Mr. Gunn — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 03:33:27 +0000

I signed up for the alpha test at Qik.com, and received my download invitation today. Here’s the deal with Qik, and it’s very simple: Your phone streams video, live, to your Qik account.

I was a little skeptical about how well this would work, but it worked flawlessly. I just started the app, my phone established a 3G connection, and I pressed “Stream”. When I finished recording my short test video, I logged in to my profile, and there it was. The site feels very much like Flickr, with tagging and sharing and commenting and so on. Videos are public and include audio by default, but you can turn the microphone off and set videos to private from the phone. They’re working on an interface to title and tag from the phone, but that part’s not ready yet. I also had some site error editing my profile, but overall, I feel pretty comfortable declaring this a “killer app” simply because it makes it so simple and easy to share video, live.

One feature I’d really like to see phone details captured, similar to the way camera info is embedded in pictures, so you can browse by phone type, like on Flickr. I’d also like some invites, so I could bring in some of my friends who I think would love this, particularly those that already have a Flickr account. I’d also like integration with Plaxo, or Open Social in general. They already integrate with Twitter.

Of course, you’ll want a phone that takes decent video, but more than that, you’ll want a phone capable of high speed data and you’ll definitely want an unlimited data plan. I used my Nokia N75 to record the demonstration video, using the Symbian version of the software, and they pretty much only support Symbian phones right now, but, hey, you should get one because they’re the best phones on the market now anyways.

There’s more from this big guy, who’s apparently been quite excitedly using it.