7 posts from May 2008

N82: camera and battery trials.

A while back, I went to watch wrestling in Burbank.  I’ve attended a lot of local wrestling shows and learned that sport mode does not work indoors. 

This is a picture using sport mode from September of last year:

As you can see, this picture is practically all black. 

Here’s an example of auto mode

The picture is still quite dark and very yellow.  The flash fired, but it didn’t help.  The ISO speed is 100 here.

I’ve found that using Landscape mode, Incandescent lighting, +0.5 exposure and high ISO settings gets accurate results.  Here’s an example with these settings:

I have those settings set up in the User defined scene mode.  These settings are helpful for capturing fast paced action, since there’s no time wasted on focus.  The problem with the user defined mode is that it takes three clicks to activate.  It would be really easier if the camera remembered the last settings used when closed.  Another great alternative would be to have keypad shortcuts.  Unlike the S60 Web browser, the number keys don’t do anything with the camera.  For now, the only way to keep these settings active is to leave the camera open and let it go to standby.  This leaves the lens unprotected and subject to dust.

This is a problem for me, since I love to sit in the front row.  Often the wrestlers will fly out of the ring and into the crowd.  When this happens, I usually close the lens protector.  It gets pretty annoying having to set up the settings each time I open the camera.

I shot over 100 photos that Sunday and by the end of the night, 3 hours of taking pictures, I still had 5 bars left on the N82.  This battery performance astounded me.  My N95 would only last about 90 minutes before hitting 1 bar of battery left.  The need for my Proporta mobile charger wasn’t needed any that night and made me very pleased.

There’s one thing the N95 has over the N82: left handed shooting.  With the N95, I could hold it in my left hand and easily make one handed shots.  With the N82, my left hand shakes due to the pressure required to press the capture button while maintaining a good grip.  I have, however, gotten the hang of one handed shooting with my right hand.  But this makes my wrist strap useless.

Over the past week, a lot of squawking has been made about N-Gage games being stuck to one handset.  People are apparently really upset that if you upgrade to a new phone, you lose your N-Gage licenses and have to buy the games all over again.

I just don't understand why everyone is so upset. 

Let's say games were not tied to one handset.  I could buy a game like Tetris and then share my login details with a friend. Or worse, I could post my login details on a message board and now hundreds of people are sharing the same game. 

Think about that from a business perspective.  Electronic Arts probably would have made $1000 from all those people buying Tetris.   Instead they'll make just $10.  There's no incentive to make more games if piracy like this will be easily rampant. 

Without more games, N-Gage dies.

If someone can afford to switch handsets every 6 months or so, how can they not afford another $30 or so for a few games? 

Maybe Nokia will want to consider a "Comes with Games" package.  They could add another $100 to the handset price and have it come with unlimited N-Gage licenses.  This could ease the pain of losing N-Gage licenses when switching phones all the time.

I could never get Sports Tracker working right on my N95.  I'd always run out of ram.  Since I'm trialling the black N82, with its 90mb of free ram, I can finally let loose with multitasking.

Yesterday I went on a walk to Radio Shack to buy an adapter.  I was able to have the music player running in the background while I turned on the Sports Tracker.  Taking pictures wasn't a problem.  Each picture I took came out great and neither the music player or Sports Tracker application crashed.  There was one problem though.  I forgot to charge up the N82 so I ran out of juice halfway on my walk.

When I came home, I plugged the N82 back in and uploaded my workout.  I had to search around a bit to figure out how to add pictures to the workout.  I found the instructions at Black Phoebe

My workout/photowalk can be found here

What I'd really like to see is a way to have an embeddable widget I could place here instead of just a link.  There are widgets for facebook and blogger and some other sites, but they show only your last workout.  I want to be able to share a specific workout.

I tried to upload the the kml file to google maps, but it wouldn't take it.  I tried a bunch of methods, but I couldn't get it to work.

Ideally, Sports Tracker and Share on Ovi would be working together with Nokia Maps to get a great united solution.  But I think we are a few years away from that.

Also,

WOM World sent me a black N82 to play with. This thing is awesome. I'm in love! I can't wait until Amazon.com has it in stock

20080512354

I never got tickets to the big show, but I'm watching at home you should too.  check out www.pangeaday.org

For weeks, I've been anticipating Pangea Day.  The website said there would be an event in Los Angeles.  I visited the website weeks ago.  I clicked attend an event on the right side of the front page.  I clicked the yellow event marker, which indicated a broadcast event. 

Pangeadayeventsmap

There's very little information there.  If you click the Watch graffic on the right side of the home page, you can then  find a link to live events.  So I made my way to the Los Angeles event site.  Last time I checked, there was no L.A. venue yet.  I checked this morning and not only is there a venue, its already sold out. 

This really sucks.  I really wanted to attend this. 

What's kind of strange is that the L.A. event is being held at the Sony Pictures Studio in Culver City instead of the Nokia Theater in downtown L.A.