Needless to say I had a great time at Disneyland on Saturday. Besides the sun not coming out and it being overcast all day everything went smoothly. The longest my girfriend and I spent in a line was 45 minutes which is nothing compared to the average 2 hour wait times. Of course she was bugging me to put my damn phone away all morning and was happy to hear my battery was dead by 1pm in the afternoon. I attemped to stream live video to Qik, geotag photos and lay them out on a map, and embed a live slideshow as I was taking photos. In case you missed the post from that day you can click here to check out the article. I ran into a few problems during the day but overall I thought I did a pretty good job of documenting as much as I could with the N95-4. Your not going to see much of Snoopy and Micky in the media below, we were more into the rides and scenery.
Battery Life
I knew the battery life of the N95-4 wasn't going to last me all day so I should've picked up an extra battery or mobile charger. The trip was last minute so I didn't have time for either. I didn't start using the phone till about 9am and like I said it finally pooped out around 1pm. Thats about four hours. In that time I took about 50 photos which were geotagged and about 30 of them were uploaded to Flickr. Over the 3g data connection I streamed about 10 minutes of live video to the internet which I'm sure did a number on the battery. I was using the 3g signal the entire time instead of switching to GSM mode when I didn't need 3g. Doing that would've conserved some battery life. I also published a blog post and sent about 10 multimedia messages to friends and family. I wish the battery was larger but there were steps I could've taken to increase the battery life, but I didn't. There was still a whole second half of the day that I didn't get to document. I missed out on recording a lot of the rides and also the new park across from Disneyland called California Adventure. I could've gotten a ton of awesome photos over there. Oh well next time I will be more prepared.
Streaming Live Video With The Qik Application
If you haven't tried out Qik to stream live video from your S60 phone to the internet then you should really give it a shot. They have fast servers and the video comes out pretty good considering your streaming wirelessly. I embedded my Qik channel into the article from the day so that readers can see the video I was taking as I go. If they wanted to they could've went to my Qik profile and started chatting with me live which is a great feature to go along with live video. Mark Guim from The Nokia Blog just recently wrote an article about the capabilities of Qik and live chatting. You can set the title of your video and description as well as you go so people know what they'e looking at. Below you can see one of the videos from the Disneyland trip that I streamed live here at Symbian Addict. Live video streaming wouldn't have been possible without the 3g internet speeds of the Nokia N95-4. It would've turned out choppy and had lots of buffering. The video below turned out to be pretty lame cuz the wizard sucked at there were no magic tricks...
Geotagging Photos & Uploading Them To A Map
I used the Location Tagger application to add the GPS location to each photo and then uploaded them to a live Google Map which was embedded here at the blog. I recently wrote up an article over at The N82 Blog which shows the steps you need to take to place your geotagged photos on a map. Click here to check that out. It's really pretty simple once you've done it a few times. As you can see from the map below we covered a pretty good amount of ground. Because of the dead battery I couldn't get photos of the other side of the park. Don't forget you can use the zoom buttons to get a closer look at the location.
View Larger Map
Photo Slideshow With Share On Ovi
Here is a slideshow of a lot of the photos I took with the N95-4. You can click the photo to see the larger version. It will take you to the Ovi website.
A Few Things Just Didn't Work
I wanted to record my distance, steps, and GPS route around Disneyland with Nokia Sports Tracker. I've used it before on the N82 and its a great application. But for the life of me I can't get it to work on the N95-4. The application loads just fine but when I click "start" to allow it to begin tracking the application just crashes. I was really bummed about that because I could've showed off the route and all the walking we did all around Disneyland.
Another thing that failed me was Share On Ovi. I wanted to upload all of my photos live to Ovi so I can share them live with you here at the blog. Well Ovi was down for maintenance pretty much the whole day. So I had to rely on Flickr. Thats actually the first time I saw Ovi down for that long so I don't think its a common occurance.
And my final complaint - No xenon flash. Most of the rides were in the dark and I wanted to take a few photos. I tried it but they came out completely useless. Below is a photo from the Pirates of The Caribbean ride. 
I have a bunch more that look just as bad if not worse. The Nokia N82 would've been the perfect phone for these lighting conditions. I would've gotten so much more detail and color, not to mention light. These horrible shots in the dark are making me really wish the N95-4 had a xenon flash like the N82. That would've made it the perfect phone for me and completely tipped the scales when it comes to my liking of the N82 over the N95.
Other than that everything else went smoothly. Besides the weak battery life the N95 8gb proved to be a great companion to recording a very special day at Disneyland.
0 comments
Post a Comment