I recently flew home from Houston to Los Angeles.  I got myself a window seat.  I was pleased to find my seat had two windows.  Inspired by a post by Monadi at phone-rush, I wanted to try GPS in mid-flight for myself.

Before takeoff, I set the N82 to offline mode and then turned it off.  When the pilot started talking, I first turned on my N95.  It took a few minutes to get a GPS lock.  I couldn't move it around without losing the signal.

I turned the N82 on and it didn't take long for it to get a signal.  I was able to keep the N82 in my shirt pocket and maintain a signal lock.  I turned on the GPS data application and got this screenshot:

I first changed a few settings.  I set the units to imperial and the GPS filtering to low.  I then activated the Sportstracker. Here is a map of my position art:

As you can see, Sportstracker logged my journey from mid-Texas to Southern California.

There is a log of the journey with a few images at the sportstracker website:
http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/workoutdetail/index.do?id=236804

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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,

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Recently, filmmaker Spike Lee announced a partnership with Nokia to make www.nokiaproductions.com.
The site wants users to upload mobile created films and Mr Lee will pick the best ones to assemble a larger film.  This reminded me of a project from 2 years ago.

Nokia N93 TVad

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Last week, I vox'd about video ringtones for S60 Feature Pack 1

Recently this site was featured on techmeme.

It adds a simple right-click-save-as link on youtube videos.
Hook up your phone with the USB cable or bluetooth and you can save directly to your phone.

Remember to save the files with the .mp4 file extension
Sometimes the videos you save don't work.  If the video doesn't playback, it will need to be converted.  Its a good idea to down convert the file to .3gp using the Nokia Video Manager for PC or Nokia Multimedia Transfer for Mac.

Tip: Cartoon intros make for great ringtones

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Many N95-1 owners upgraded to the N95 8GB because there is so much more RAM.  With 90MB free at boot, they were counting on being able to make and edit movies without out of memory errors like on the N95-1.  They were then disappointed that their N95 8GB has no video editor at all.

It turns out, the video editor has been moved to the N-Series PC Suite under the Nokia Photos application.  You can create Muvee's and have more easier control over the video editing compared to the on device version, since you have a full keyboard and mouse.

Nokia Photos with Muvee editing is free software for Windows.  However, if you are going to do video editing on a computer, you are probably better off using Adobe Premier, but that is very expensive software.  Either way, you'll probably need a strong cpu, since video editing is very processor intensive.

If you're on a Mac, you'll probably be using iMovie regardless since there's no PC Suite for Mac yet.

You can download the N-Series PC Suite here

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While at BarcampLA5, Ralf Pieper gave a demo of the N95-3.  He won it back at MobileCampLA.
He gave a demo of his prize and sang its praises and aired many grievances.

He likes the wifi and SIP capabilities. 
He likes the ability to add applications and task manager. 
He likes the loud speakers.

He doesn't like the steep learning curve or slowness of the UI
He loaded too many wifi locations and has run out of memory every time the wifi wizard loads.
He hated how slow the camera loads. 

I think that's the most important annoyance about the N95 NAM.  The camera is very slow.  The N95 NAM has a terrible 7-8 second load time. 

A typical end user like Ralf is not going to want to climb the learning curve if the one of the N95's main features doesn't perform well.

How can this be fixed?

NEW FIRMWARE

On the original N95 (with v20 firmware), the camera application loads very quickly.  It takes about 4 seconds for the camera to load after opening the lens shutter. On the N95 8GB, its even faster with 2 second load time.  This is due to a combination of new camera optimizations and demand paging.

Demand paging would fix a lot of the problems Ralf or anyone else might have with the N95 NAM.  It speeds up the loading time of the camera and speeds up the whole UI as well.

The N95 NAM hasn't seen an update in almost 3 months.  That is long overdue.
 

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Here I am amazing Douglas Welch doing video editing on the N95.  I love his reaction to the capabilities of the N95.  We had a conversation about how he wants an N95 so he can shoot QIK video.  But he is quite happy with the gear he already has. 

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On This Week in Tech episode 134, Leo and his guests talked about RSS feeds and podcasting.

Twit podcast_1

1. The device should have a podcatcher built in.  It should work over wifi.  It should work without being tethered to a computer.  They mentioned this won't happen on an iPhone even with the upcoming SDK, since Apple will never let this happen.  They want you tethered.
2. The device should be able to put your own software on it.
3. You should be able to record your own podcasts and broadcast it.

Dvorak says a pda serves this purpose and he's almost right.  One of the guests doesn't think such a device will exist until 5 years from now.  S60 phones, like the Nokia N95, do all this and more.

1. S60 has a great podcasting app that can do scheduled downloads over wifi.  You can delete files when you're done.  You can search by genre or add the RSS feed manually.  It's so much better than iTunes, but hardly anyone knows about it. 
   
2. S60 is open to new features.  The SDK is already here.
3. You can record up to an hour with the built in sound recorder on the n95.  With 3rd party software, you can record in mp3 or other formats.
   

You can listen to TwiT 134 here:
http://twit.tv/134

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A while back, I put a daydream to VOX about having metal faceplates on the N95.

I recently came across this post from MAKE magazine
Its a Macbook AIR modded with carbon fiber.

Certainly, this can be done for the N95 and plenty of other Nokia devices.

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I think I found the best camera settings for concerts and sports.

1) Landscape mode
2) Adjust the light settings, if you are indoors, check fluorescent or incandescent
3) Set the ISO to high
4) Turn off the flash

These are the settings I used to capture this shot of wrestler Candice LaRae performing a moonsault.

PWG ¡Dia de los Dangerous!, originally uploaded by Al Pavangkanan.

I also used these settings for this concert photography set here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/drtran/sets/72157603985517716/

In the future, I'd love to see Nokia manage a higher ISO mode, like 800 or higher. This will lead to less blur in action shots.  Another suggestion would be for a faster burst mode. Right now, the S60 imaging software takes a picture every 5 seconds or so in burst mode. I'd like something faster, like to be able to shoot 4 pictures per second like Sony Ericsson's Best Pic feature.  And one more thing I'd like to see in future camera phones: RAW mode.

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