As part of its promotional activities for the N8, Nokia is releasing a series of overview videos presented by Chris Bennetts, a Senior Product Manager at the company. The second video cover the Photos, Photo Editor and Videos Editor application as well as USB On-The-Go functionality; rather than just linking to it or embedding it, we've broken this video down in detail to offer you some insight into the N8's photo and video software. Read on for further details.
Read on in the full article.
Nice to see on-phone editing returning .. remember it was included in the original N95 firmware .. but disappeared from subsequent updates.
It took a while but nice to see it making a return.
The Nokia N8 is an amazing phone and I am sure it will deliver but seriously, could they have found a less charismatic bloke to present these clips. He is sooooo boring!
and with all these lovely divx and xvid files I have on mass storage are useless when plugged into the n8 😃 What a crying shame.
According to Blog-N8.fr, a French Nokia representative confirmed that the N8 would be able to natively play DivX encoded videos, along with the H.264, MPEG4 and other formats mentioned at the handset�s official launch.
Regarding DivX...relax, I am sure that Coreplayer or something similar will soon appear for the likes of the N8.
This marketing dorkiness is Nokia inertia, rather than a thoughtful decision by Nokia to avoid fighting by Apple's new rules. Pity. So what does Steve Jobs vs 'a Nokia product manager' tell us?
Thinking broadly, I suppose in one corner you've got Apple's reality distortion field - powered by (1) its genuinely excellent product designs, user i/f etc (2) beneficial US culture/loyal fan culture hybrid, (3) Steve Jobs charisma (odd really cos he isn't all that charismatic) and (4) massive app developer industry (but its software isn't perfect - itunes software needs work).
In the other corner is Nokia (1) a genuine corp - not a one man show but a damaged brand (2) producing phones that almost always seem to miss at least one trick, (3) user experiences that are kind of clunky with journeyman touchscreen experiences (3) with about 5 applications (it looks like it may be worse for symbian^3 and Nokia's own software cock-ups litter the battlefield - it needs some really tough management there)..
But (4) Nokia does however have really good upcoming product hardware in the N8.
So I'd say contrasting the Apple videos with N8 videos just about sums things up. Nice phone, shame about everything else.
> According to Blog-N8.fr, a French Nokia representative confirmed that the N8 would be able to natively play DivX encoded videos, along with the H.264, MPEG4 and other formats mentioned at the handset�s official launch.
Nope, that was updated - Nokia France officially said N8 won't play DivX. HOWEVER, a couple of people around the web have said that the early N8's they used were able to play DivX so it's somewhat up in the air.
NOKIA - PLEASE include DivX/Xvid playback capability. There are a LOT of people that want this very badly (proof can be found in comments on N8 blog posts all over the web). And it needs to cope with .avi containers. Will be a real shame if such a capable device as the N8 cannot be used as a media player to playback the most used non-streaming video format in use today.
Having to convert DivX videos to another format is NOT acceptable, it's a big hassle, and requires time and a PC, and means media can't be just played (or copied then played) off a USB stick etc.
> Regarding DivX...relax, I am sure that Coreplayer or something similar will soon appear for the likes of the N8.
The coreplayer team seem to have given up - they have failed for some time to support S60 5th ed. Shame as coreplayer is really capable on earlier S60 devices.
AAS - are you able to get official confirmation of DivX capability? (playback, but recording too would be a major bonus!)
Who on earth uses Divx any more? Everything I get is MKV container with h.264 and AC3 audio and that is a piece of cake to transcode to a native mpeg container.
So, drop Divx and move to something more standard, everyone else has. Even my LG TV can play MKV now.
I really like the editing capabilities. Although I would be really interested to know as well if the N8 will support the UPnP capability that was introduced in the 1st S60v3 phones. This feature was dropped in later Symbian phones and though not used by many, was still a useful feature when combined with a compatible router.
Unregistered wrote:This marketing dorkiness is Nokia inertia, rather than a thoughtful decision by Nokia to avoid fighting by Apple's new rules. Pity. So what does Steve Jobs vs 'a Nokia product manager' tell us?.
With nokia it's about the phone, with Apple it's all about Steve Jobs and his ego.
It was a video about the N8, not the guy presenting. I didn't even notice the presenter, and that's the way it should be as far as I'm concerned. If I see a video with Steve Jobs in it I just don't even bother watching. I do own an iPhone but I don't subscribe to being a sucker fan of a corporation, especially now that Apple have supplanted Microsoft and taken over as evil corp that represents everything bad about business.
@aas I like your analysis of these videos. Keep it coming!
An idea: After Apple presenting iMovie for the iPhone, I'd love to see a head to head between the N8's capabilities in this field and iMovie for iPhone.
In terms of the N8, I think no one doubts its capabilities in terms of pictures and videos. I think the videos also show that the OS is quite responsive even when trying the edit together a video with up to 6 media items.
However, I think the thing that continues to worry me with Nokia's phones is the third party apps. For instance, the world cup now comes up and the iPhone has plenty of decent apps to follow the event. The best Symbian has is the AP app and it is so slow that it is basically unusable. I don't know whether it is a poorly programmed app or whether WRT is not up to the job yet. In any case, if Nokia wants me to seriously consider the N8, they'll have to show that the N8 will do better with these things.
As a side not, to what extend are you buying into a "dead-end" with Symbian 3? Supposedly, Symbian 4 is just around the corner and represents a platform break. I bought an N900 last December, but have already sold it as I feel Nokia has not given it the support it deserves (given its capabilities and price). Will the same happen with Nokia N8?
Unless I get good answers to these questions, I am afraid my next phone won't be a Nokia 😞
bheetebrij wrote:
Unless I get good answers to these questions, I am afraid my next phone won't be a Nokia 😞
You should ask Nokia, this site is not and shouldn't be any official source for technical information. Additionally at least I couldn't care less what your next phone is or isn't.
Unofficially and what can be seen from videos etc. N8 is going to improve a lot in every area of previous Symbian phones.
I know N8 is pitched as mid-to-high-end, but isn't it likely to be the new 5800 ?
Get the price down a bit and why not? The hardware looks designed for that market.
yade wrote:The Nokia N8 is an amazing phone and I am sure it will deliver but seriously, could they have found a less charismatic bloke to present these clips. He is sooooo boring!
Perhaps that's to make the N8 seem even moooore interesting 🙄
bheetebrij wrote:
However, I think the thing that continues to worry me with Nokia's phones is the third party apps. For instance, the world cup now comes up and the iPhone has plenty of decent apps to follow the event. The best Symbian has is the AP app and it is so slow that it is basically unusable. I don't know whether it is a poorly programmed app or whether WRT is not up to the job yet. In any case, if Nokia wants me to seriously consider the N8, they'll have to show that the N8 will do better with these things.As a side not, to what extend are you buying into a "dead-end" with Symbian 3? Supposedly, Symbian 4 is just around the corner and represents a platform break. I bought an N900 last December, but have already sold it as I feel Nokia has not given it the support it deserves (given its capabilities and price). Will the same happen with Nokia N8?
The app-gap is going to be continue to be a concern, but this is improving and will continue to do so (especially next year). Things like the Nokia Qt SDK and the maturing Ovi Store will help. As with anything else you have to balance this against other factors. I think most people will find there's relatively few third party apps they use lots and lots - whereas a decent camera is a must have (depends on person clearly).
I think you can overplay the buying into the dead end with Symbian^3 - there's going to be plenty of Symbian^3 devices and while Symbian^4 will arrive in relatively short order this does not mean Symbian^3 will go away. I also would expect Qt will mean more 'back ported apps' than usual.
Unregistered wrote:
AAS - are you able to get official confirmation of DivX capability? (playback, but recording too would be a major bonus!)
It does not have it. However I will seek some clarification on this early next week.
Gabeuk wrote:I know N8 is pitched as mid-to-high-end, but isn't it likely to be the new 5800 ?Get the price down a bit and why not? The hardware looks designed for that market.
Not really. I think there's a good bet that there will be a cheaper device that will be the new 5800. I'd say this is more like a touch version of the N86 - but that only a simple way of looking at it.
The Nokia N8 is an amazing phone and I am sure it will deliver but seriously, could they have found a less charismatic bloke to present these clips. He is sooooo boring!
This is the N8's product manager - i.e. effectively the person in charge of creating the device. I would father rather hear from him than a mindless (PR) drone. It's way more genuine and honest. I think its great to see Nokia embrace this approach - different messaging and channels for different people - much better than a rendered 'fake' demo video.
And believe me doing those demos is a lot harder than it looks.
That was really cool, not sure how much I would even use such a function but have go admit that is a pretty impressive movie-making tool they have there in the works. Be interested to know what format the final cut together movies output in but it was nifty. And if you could mix in music...
yade wrote:The Nokia N8 is an amazing phone and I am sure it will deliver but seriously, could they have found a less charismatic bloke to present these clips. He is sooooo boring!
I'll take this guy over any of the self-absorbed pricks on the iphone videos, proclaiming how their product is 'going to change the way we communicate, forever'..
Jeeez, AFAIK OTG was a technology on devices equiped with USB host functionality which allows to copy all the content from slave device to mater with one touch of a button.
The N8 has rather USB host then OTG (but i suppose OTG can be emulated in software)......
USB OTG refers to the ability of the host to operate in either host or slave mode depending upon what you connect it to. Anything beyond that is something layered on top.
First, I would like to object re: divX being not the preferred video format for PC playback. Most of the movie downloads are still encoded in this format.
Secondly, even if mp4 and h.264 becomes the predominant format, these are formats that Nokia smartphones have supported since a decade ago (in addition to .3gp).
The robustness of a device's multimedia capabilities hinge largely on 1) the interface and 2) the number of standards its support (3.5 mm jack, bluetooth 2.2 audio profile, the number of multiple formats it can play natively)...
That's not "robustness". Get a dictionary.
Anyone know if this is supported?
here's part 3 of 3
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/video/video.php?v=128325343857233