Category: n80

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Nokia Media Transfer beta for OSX

I just came across a link in my feeds giving a heads up about a new OSX beta download from Nokia, it’s for an application called Nokia Media Transfer. At first I thought it would just be some badly ported software for Mac, but it’s actually pretty good. It manages the setup and control of audio & video media files from your phone.

The cool part is that it sets up your phone’s camera to be a source camera for iPhoto, Image capture etc. So no need to manually transfer and import the files, it will just sync up over bluetooth when you start iPhoto. It will also do the same with iTunes, syncing playlists etc.

I don’t use my phone for music but I do take a fair amount of photos with it so the iPhoto integration is pretty cool. There is also an application called Nokia Device Browser which can be used to browse the files and folders on your phone, it works much better than the default OSX bluetooth file browser, there’s a screen shot of device browser in action below.

Here’s a few screenshots of some of the screens involved:

Nokia Media Transfer application icon

Nokia Media Transfer application icon

Menubar options

Picture of Menu bar options

Expanded Menubar options

Expanded menubar options

Device settings for my Nokia N80

Picture of Device settings

iPhoto source menu showing N80

Picture of iPhoto source menu

Device Browser

Picture of Nokia Device Browser

All in all Nokia Media Transfer looks pretty good, it definitely isn’t just a piece of badly ported software. If Nokia can manage to make the software experience better then they will be going a long way to getting out of the trap that many hardware device manufacturers find themselves in, that of having great hardware but absolutely terrible software. Sony, I’m looking in your direction!

To use Nokia Media Transfer you will need Mac OS X 10.4.9 or higher, iTunes 7 or higher, and iPhoto 6 or higher.

~Rick

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Cool gadget, cool site

On the new gadget front I am just about to get a Nokia N80 phone as my contract is up with T-Mobile, after being with T-Mobile for over 7 years I’m about to jump ship over to Orange instead, they had a really good deal on offer coupled with having the Nokia N80 so that sold it to me.

What’s cool about the N80? Well, it’s got (amongst other things!):

Pictue of Nokia N80 phone

  • Integrated 3 megapixel camera (2048 x 1536 pixels)
  • High-quality video capture in MP4 and 3GP formats with up to 5x digital zoom, Video capture resolutions: 352 x 288; 176 x 144 pixels
  • Image and video uploading to the Web
  • S60 3rd Edition software on Symbian OS
  • Integrated digital music player with stereo audio. Supported file formats: MP3, AAC, m4a, eAAC+ and wma
  • Stereo FM radio
  • Multimedia player (RealPlayer) with 3GPP & MPEG4 AVC video streaming support
  • Internet browser (Based on Safari’s WebKit core)
  • Integrated Wireless LAN (802.11g) and UPnP (Universal Plug and Play)
  • Bluetooth wireless technology
  • Infrared
  • Pop-Port? interface with USB 2.0 Full Speed with mass storage class

So, it’s pretty cool! : )

I came across a cool site called ‘We Feel Fine‘ which is an interesting idea, it’s more of an artwork than an application, on the site they say:

At the core of We Feel Fine is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.

We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. This is an approach that was inspired by techniques used in Listening Post, a wonderful project by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.

Once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.

Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified “feelings”. This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs.

It’s pretty cool, go check it out, www.wefeelfine.org/

~Rick