I had to make some grovelling phone calls last week after losing my mobile phone somewhere vaguely near Old Street tube. Only it wasn't my phone - it was a Nokia N93 on loan for me to try out. Gulp. Still, at least now it's missing I know what I'm missing about it.
First, you need to understand just how massive this thing was. Friends mocked my seemingly Michael-Douglas-in-Wall-Street-era phone. I swear it was heavier than my very first mobile in 1999, which at least had the option of a Rasta flag fascia during my Barrington Levy phase.
So the deal is that this phone (currently selling on eBay for anything up to £425...) has a swivelly screen bit so that it switches between three modes: phone, camera and viewer.
My capsule review: As a phone it's just too chunky, as a camera the software was infuriatingly slow and the live picture quality was poor, but as a viewer it was bloody brilliant. The screen came into its own when I was lent a copy of Mission Impossible 3 on a memory stick to try out (also lost).
Having heard repeatedly that the most watchable mobile content is between two to three minutes long and shot specifically for mobile, I was extremely sceptical about watching a full-length film. And let's not have the Tom Cruise discussion.
Vic Keegan wrote about Slingbox this week and we were comparing notes about our viewing experiences on mobiles. He said the picture quality was better than the reception he gets at home and it did look pretty good on his Nokia 73. But I have to say the picture quality on that N93 was really quite amazing, and Mi:3 was a well chosen, fast-moving, big explosions kind of film that showed it off well. It's only a 2.4" screen but don't underestimate how quickly your mind adjusts to a different screen size once you get involved in something. The picture was super crisp and super slick - a world away from the pixel-heavy clunky graphics we're used to.
Watching the film on the go was a problem if I had to just break off and look up at the the train times screen, for example, purely because you have to take your eyes off the screen. That's where audio has the advantage. But I don't think chapterising the content would have helped particularly; someone had the foresight to allow you to restart the film from where you left off, thankfully. I should add I always watched this with headphones on, before I get an email from Ken .
Anyway, I was just getting into my flow and starting to track down more cool mobile video stuff that I could use to try and convert the natives - and then lost the damn phone.
I choose to think that the phone may have been found by a member of East London's enthusiastic techie/design community who are using it for creative inspiration before they hand it in at the local plod shop first thing in the morning. Possibly.
