Symbian has released an official (video) webcast, in both RealPlayer and Windows Media format, with CEO Nigel Clifford talking about the significant '100 million smartphones' milestone. Here's the link.
Read on in the full article.
The official '100 million' webcast
Interesting that you can't view it from a N80.
In fact can anyone with a Symbian phone view the webcast?
I don't know about this particular webcast but i had tried another official symbian webcast a few weeks ago and it didn't work on my E61 either. Quite ironic when Symbian CEO claims everywhere that Symbian phones are actually "multimedia computers" and are "what computers have become".
Well, so the future of multimedia computers according to Symbian are machines that can not even play webcasts... A bit of consistency wouldn't hurt here. Is anybody at the upper levels of Symbian actually using symbian phones for anything else than making phone calls?
To be fair to Symbian, they're outsourcing the webcast through another company. Also, who in their right mind is going to want to sit through this sort of webcast on a smartphone over typical European data rates? I think it's fair to say that most people will watch this on a desktop, if at all.
Still, yes, you'd have thought they could have stuck up a MP4 version of the basic headshot video, to keep us power users happy 8-)
Steve
Reasons why cost of data rates might not matter:
- you're on a fixed rate plan
- somebody else pays for it (such as an employer)
- your so wealthy that it doesn't matter
- you use a devide with Wi-Fi/WLAN and use that instead of cellular
In other words, plenty of additional reasons for the bigges mobile device OS company to provide at least their own content in a format that's compatible with their own mobile devices. 😉
slitchfield wrote:Also, who in their right mind is going to want to sit through this sort of webcast on a smartphone over typical European data rates?
Me 😉
When i'm at home, i generally use my E61 to check the latest posts on blogs and forums via my wifi connection. Much more practical than having to fire up the pc and sit down in front of it. And i never thought that PCs were really suitable for webcasts. In fact, i hardly ever watched webcasts until I had my E61. The image quality of a webcast is always very poor (in order to keep the file size small) so having a giant screen is useless for that. In addition, unlike movies, you generally don't need to give your full attention to the picture when watching webcasts. So smartphones are really the ideal platform for webcast viewing. Their screen have the perfect size and you can bring them with you wherever you go while keep watching your webcast. I now regularly watch webcast on my E61 while cooking dinner in the kitchen. And if i need to go to another room, i can just take my phone with me and keeping watching. No comparison with having the sit down like a dick in front of your PC doing nothing for the whole duration of the webcast.
This is my view of "what computers have become". I'm not sure whether this is what Nigel meant when he said that though.
slitchfield wrote:
I think it's fair to say that most people will watch this on a desktop, if at all.
True. I guess that only a few desperate geeks (or "power users" as you say) attempt to watch webcasts on their smartphones. I wish that Nokia would release a "power user" device or line of devices aimed specifically at us. Unfortunately, we're not quite a big enough group i suppose. The E61 comes close but it's still a bit too dumbed down and intentionally crippled.