78 posts tagged “n95”

The dutch NOS (national broadcast service) has now started streaming their news videos as well as live streams of the olympics for the mobile phone platform. At the same time they upgraded their mobile site and added a dedicated new application as a download option. It features an enhanced news experience including live video media streaming of the Olympics.

website

Their all new refurbished mobile website now presents the topics news, sports, weather and traffic information. In addition the latest newsvideo broadcast can be streamed from the site directly onto your mobile device. On the Nokia N95 it is done using realplayer. The mobile site also features a download section offering a dedicated news application to be downloaded. For my N95 this was a properly signed *.sisx application.

news application

The dedicated news application the information of their mobile website and extra articles and videos. The interface is a bit more slick that their mobile website and features a 'news ticker' with the latest info. Additonally they are offering several video streams: the news in the last 24 hours,  the latest news, separate news items (about China, Birma etc..) as were already possible to view with the flash-enhanced webbrowser of the N95, live political streaming of discussions from the Hague (yuck) and upto 6 live streams from the Olympics and Roland Garros. The Olympic channel selection for the mobile consumer is now wider than that of the tv-consumer. The application installation went flawless though it did gave a message that it was, at the least, free until end of 2008. Let's hope it stays like that.

Upto now I was annoyed that the Brittish and the Germans could watch their national news broadcasts on the Nokia n-series but we as the dutch could not. In one step we are on par or perhaps even slightly better off ;-)

In the last few months I have seen an increase of dedicated mobile websites delivering to the point efficient information with only minor ads. Anything from cinema guides, TV-guides, weather, news to traffic information. Many of them I prefer over using RSS and the larger PC oriented sites. RSS often has randomly abbreviated information) bits luring you into going to PC-oriented sites with obnoxious popups, flashmovies or mindless jabber to get to the real bits. Mobile sites lets people reinvent the art of using limited screenspace useful.

I will regret the day my phone gains 1024x758 pixels of resolution.

Hi Folks, AAS beat me to the news. Nokia Maps 2.0 is out of beta. Maps 2.0 is a huge improvement on 1.0. In the netherlands they directions now correspond with roadsigns info, routing is much improved. Pedestrian routing added. New improved userinterface, more countries added to the list of countries with supported voice navigation. Sattelite views for selected cities and support for integrated magnetic compass (Nokia 6210 Navigator). Real time traffic info support optionally. My existing license works under 2.0 as well as 1.0.

Take a look at AAS for a complete overview of the changes or swoop down to Nokia for the quick download.

Altough TomTom Navigator works on the N95 and other S60 3rd edition phones. It does not support the internal N95 GPS. For over a year now the N95-owners were forced to buy an external bluetooth GPS if they wanted TomTom to work on their phone. In comparison CoPilot, Route 66, Smart2Go/NokiaMaps, Navigon, Nav4All all worked with the internal GPS. However www.tweakers.net, a dutch tweakers-website, reports that a group of hackers called 'Binpda' have released a workaround for Tomtom Navigator 6.02. It works through adding an extra bluetooth profile and running a small virtual bluetooth-gps program that accesses the internal GPS. Allowing TomTom to connect with the internal GPS thinking it is an external bluetooth GPS.

Why TomTom themselves has not added support for a phone that has already sold over 10 million pieces is unclear to me. As such, Nokia Maps was the best option for me last year. This despite at that point there were some stability issues and missing AGPS support. I should say it worked well despite some lesser choices in routing. The price per year (for a 3-year license) was 1/6-th of that of a TomTom license per year. For those not needing it for daily driving during office hours and not requiring real time traffic info, it was a particular good choice. And cheap, very cheap since TomTom forced you to buy an additional bluetooth GPS mouse for another 60+ euros. For those looking for ultracheap satnav there is still Nav4All for the N95. Taking only a minimal of mobile internet usage to guide you. The cheapest yet unless roaming!

To date Nokia Maps 2.0 beta is nearly out of beta. It has been improved on nearly all fronts. It has the ability to use internet if available for POI searches and routing. It gained a much better display layout, much better routing and has become very stable. There is a AAS review of Maps 2.0 beta 1. Also real time traffic info data is now a extra option. And no, Nokia did not asked money for these free upgrades. Excellent and fair. In Nokia Maps 2.0 beta 2 only few bugs and issues remain. As such Nokia Maps 2.0 is becoming a serious competitor in price and quality compared with TomTom. And Nokia is already making in-roads into the car business. Renault is selling special edition cars with Nokia phone's with GPS navigation and factory built-in carkits (Renault Sandero Nokia with the N95, Renault Twingo Nokia edition with the Nokia Navigator 6110).

It looks that that gold digging in the satnav sector with PNA's is past its prime. And companies such TomTom will no longer be able to support themselves by selling PNA's. Looking back, putting TomTom on the stockmarket by their founders last year was a great way to cash-in timely. Convergence will connect all the different little sales markets of consumer navigation into one big battlefield. The fight for dominance and survival will become fierce. Giving consumers the top dollar for their euros.

The world is full of mp3 players and many people own and carry them around next to their mobile phone. You can find anything from 1 GB microsized music dice to slimwaisted 160GB iPod-classic's. When only parts of my music collection fits on my phone I find I wanted to play that one number that is missing... But do I really need to lug an 160GB iPod with me for just music? Skip to the How-to to get a quick solution or read the background first for an informed solution.

Mp3 and compression

When mp3-compression became available it was possible to store  high-sound-quality music rather memory efficient (read: affordable) onto your PC for random access and playback. Struggling with bitrates and noisy soundcards it was still largely about: 'because I could'. With increasing cheaper diskspace, better soundcards and compression techniques like AAC, mp3Pro and WMA9 it became more useful and practical. It became practical for me when convergence hit the mobile phone. My trusty SonyEricsson w800i could not only take 2.1MPixels pictures, it could play music. As such it had a cool orange color and sported the Walkman logo...

So several years ago I made the effort of converting all my CD's into 320 kbps mp3 and stored them on my PC. At that time 320 kbps was needed to preserve the quality. Admittedly mp3-codecs were then sufficiently efficient good that 192 kbps might suffice. But in order to recode them later to lower bitrates without irritating recoding errors the bitrate of 320 kbps was a much better choice.

Recent developments into compression formats like AAC, HE-AAC, mpc and Ogg show that at 128 kpbs a perfect sound quality can be achieved. A quality where all sound artifacts are beyond the threshold of human perception. See soundexpert.info's 128 kbps testresults. AAC is doing very well, and it's successor HE-AAC v1 is doing even even better in those results. 64 kbps HE-AAC v1 (aka eAAC) performs close to perfect which is incidently only slightly better than HE-AAC v2 at a lowly 48 kbps, aka eAAC+. Compression formats which the Nokia N95 and many of the NSeries phones support.

Simply explained AAC +SideBandReplication = HE-AAC v1. AAC + SBR + Parametric Stereo = HE-AAC v2 = eAAC+. SBR (sideband replication) is mostly useful upto 128 kbps and PS (parametric stereo) up to 48 kbps. More about it can be found on the Coding Technologies HE-AAC page. In short, above 48 kbps eAAC+ defaults to eAAC encoding and above 128 kbps eAAC+ defaults to AAC encoding.

Accidently, 48 kbps eAAC+ is the default encoding quality of the Nokia Music Manager. This quality is considered by the progam to be good quality and optimal for mobile application. An additonal bonus of the 48 kbps HE-AAC with SBR and PS encoding is that is designed to be very power efficient to decode/play. Better than mp3 or regular AAC. 64 kbps eAAC is considered by the Nokia Music Manager to be excellent quality.

Howto

My collection of mostly 320 kbps encoded mp3's (some are 192 kbps) on my home PC requires about 26 GB of diskspace. Converting it into eAAC+ at 48 kbps reduces it into 4.65 gigabyte. Not bad for 'good' not excellent rated compression. We are talking here about 9 days of contineous music. Add about a 1.5GB for the Maps of USA or either the Europe for Nokia Maps and you have about 1.5 GB left for recording film, photos on a 8GB memory card. Do you want excellent quality nearly indistinguishable from the original? Go 64 kbps if you are a classical music loving audiophile. But otherwise it is not worth it, especially not on your phone.

How to convert? Although Nokia Music Manager can do the encoding for you it does not cope well with encoding my 3000+ music files. It simple crashes at some point. The free version of WinAmp however works great and gives a very nice quality. Nero gives even better encoding results. Simple import your mp3's into the winamp music libary and 'send to' the 'Format Converter'. Select an output folder and the first AAC Plus converter in the list. Next set 48 kbps and parametric stereo. After 24 hours or so it is finnished converting everything on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4.

Audio quality, practical aspects and it's pricetag

An 8 GB microSD card costs about 50 euros and can store about 11 days of music at nearly indistinguishable CD quality in 64 kbps eAAC or 15 days of music if you are happy with a pretty good mobile quality of 48 kbps in eAAC+. In comparison a separate iPod or iTouch with regular AAC at 128 kbps would in comparison require at least 21 GB of diskspace. Neither iPod or iTouch come close into the 50 euros price range. In fact iPod classic prices currently start around 230 euros. Of course a 80 Gigabytes mp3-player is very cheap for that price. But it is way to much for just music.

A good argument might be the sound quality. My N95 has a slight hiss at low volumes, the iPod has a better sound. Well this is true. However a good bluetooth stereo headset can be bought for a mere 50-60 euros. The bluetooth headset has it's own D/A converter and a good one has no background hiss. The additional advantage is that if you buy a bluetooth headset like the Nokia BH-500 with a regular 3.5 mm headphone connector, you can connect any headset you like. You can even connect it to your stereo allowing it to work as a A2DP gateway. Playing music straight from the couch over the stereo. At this point you would still have paid only 110 euros versus a 230 euros for the cheapest iPod classic which has no bluetooth support or a remote controlled headset. Seems to me there is even plenty enough money left to shell out for a spare phone battery of 20 euros ;-)

Currently neither the iPod, the iTouch or the iPhone support any of the better HE-AAC codecs, silly is it not? Particular since Apple put AAC on the consumers map. This year 16GB and 32GB microSD cards are entering the market giving eAAC+ capable phones an even stronger position particular against the iTouch/iPhone in musical terms. Even audiophiles with very large music collections (800+ albums) can carry all their music in their 'pocket' at 128 kbps in top notch HE-AAC. No battery draining streaming, no network load or cost, no ORB or winamp remote required. Just random music access from you on your phone, a properly spelled phone. You see it, don't ya? There is no i in these phones!

P.S. At 3000+ songs the music player starts becomes a bit sluggish when browsing the songlistings. Minor acceptable delays occur when opening the song/artist/album lists.

Update: A comparison of eAAC+ (48 kbps, SBR+PS) and AAC+ (64 kbps, SBR) can been found at the Hydrogen Audio Forums. Particular this result gives a good representation of the practicality of using parametric stereo. It seems a HE-AAC V3 standard with a variable stereo bitrates would be useful to be developped for classical music.

Quietly and without fanfare the N95 has now been around for about a year in most countries. Time to think back and remember last year and ask yourself:

And be completely honest with yourself. Feel free to answer anything as silly as: I wanted the geekiest smartphone on the market. Or I just bought the most expensive one. Or it was monday. Be honest to yourself. Because now you can answer the following question in earnest:

Did it promise every thing I wanted and did it do everything it promised? Never mind those grumpy other people, where you content? With your phone? In the last year we have seen, slider problems, at least 4 firmware updates for the N95 to fix some minor and some glaring bugs. Compared my old mobile phones never needed firmware updates. They worked. Simple.

However the last year we not only got bug fixes, we got added features with the firmware, complimentary software from Nokia. Upgrades. Things like:

• correcting purplish pictures
• fixed hidden network problems (finally)
  
• added demand paging to solve the limited memory
  
• increased phone speed and battery usage
• A-GPS support
• an improved Nokia Maps 2.0 beta
  
• added geo-tagging
• Share Online for blogging
  
• Internet radio
  
• flash-in--web page support.
  
• N-Gage

and so on... A rather new approach for a company, particular Nokia. Nokia's N-series phones seem to get firmware upgrades and software enhancements as much as a Linux OS gets in a year. Better yet, Nokia Beta labs seems to want to track and field test the latest developments for mobile phones. Now a year later I wonder:
.

Is it? Al major bugs solved, all promises fulfilled albeit a bit late? Or is there one missing?

And NO, requests for touchscreen are NOT allowed ;-)

Here are my answers:

• I wanted: 3G, wifi, e-mail, web browsing, GPS with satnav, quality 3+ MPixel photo camera and occasional decent 640x480 video recording. The specs promised all, but did they deliver?
  
• I got last year: Every I wanted and more like SIP, A2DP, uPnP support and reading office documents attached to e-mail. But I also got purplish images, slow GPS-locking and a rather unstable and simple satnav and slider problems. And of course system crashes due to limited memory. Connecting to hidden wifi networks gave serious troubles.
  
• I got now: All I wanted then with an much improved Nokia Maps beta, and things like SIP, A2DP, uPnP support and reading office documents attached to e-mail. Speed, stability and battery usage are now acceptable. In fact I currently use almost all the applications of the phone. And yes, hidden wifi networks work fine now.
  
• My one wish: Decent S/MIME support for e-mails. I want it even more than Skype.

And yes, my next phone should be Symbian Touch, have a magnetic compass for pedestrian navigation, 3x optical zoom, better jpeg-quality, Xenon-flash, be twice as fast, twice as more power effcient and be exactly the same size! Support virtual dolby surround and a builtin bluetooth headset! And oh yes, it should be able to be used in the pouring rain! Although I draw the line at these Burlandish antics.

Is it still worth the bucks? Feel free to answer my questions in the comments below ;-)

www.tweakers.net reported it yesterday evening. It's really there including audio streaming of 30 second song samples. Nice. Still a music shop selling drm is not my beef. Actually I prefere the real CD's. They are like a free backup copy, rip'em and play'em where ever I am. Plus I have a free backup to store on the attic.

For now drm-free music is the next best thing to a real CD.

Nokia's OVI site suggests playing Fifa `08. Nokia's nseries now carries 'N-Gage is Live'. We could say it is now officially online. The game of the week changed this monday from System Rush to Hooked On and they added Fifa `08 to the list of available games.

Just logged into n-gage preview and they told me to goto the www.n-gage.com page and download+install the n-gage application there!  Currently there is support for the following phones:

• Nokia N81
• Nokia N81 8GB
• Nokia N82
• Nokia N95
• Nokia N95 8GB
  

The N73, the N93 and the N93i are said to be expected to be added soon. Currently the download is running and installation will be soon ;-)

Update: Installation went smooth. No problems. Registering went allright allthough it would not take my e-mail adres. I'll have to try that later again.

Current games available are

• System Rush Evolution
• Asphalt 3: Street Rules
• Brain Challenge
• World Series Poker
• Hooked On

Update 2: Several game prices seem to have been upgraded to 9 euros.

My N95 was upgraded yesterday with firmware v21. Today I reinstalled Share Online 3.0 on it. Of course I visited their mobile site to see if everything worked and if my content was still there. Behold, their mobile site now served my MP4 video's as 3GP (176x144 pixel). The video's can't be viewed from within Share Online. You have to use the webbrowser. However it is another step for mobile web penetration. Formerly MP4-video's could only be viewed with flash on their desktop oriented website.

With the new V21 firmware on the N95 you can visit their desktop website too and play the fullsized flash videos on your N95 from the browser. I recommend you have sufficient bandwidth to stream that. Now we  truly have the best of both worlds. View a OVI desktop movie here:

And the mobile version  here (best to switch to your mobile browser ;-) ). I hope the  other nseries models get their firmware upgrade with integrated flashplayer soon. It is far more useful than expected.

All About Symbian reported it here. Time to update folks... I fear emTube will be reduced to a standalone flashplayer. Finally I can acces youtube playlists. Can hardly wait until tonite for my update.

Grtz,

  Snoyt