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Share Online: Why Nokia has it wrong. Again.

Being surrounded by oceans of happy, gloating, iPhone users is not an easy thing, especially in America. Having invested a very large amount of money in my Nokia N95-8GB means that I need to come up with angles to justify that decision. The best one I could think of is this: there is no other phone that could provide the ability to generate content and record life in image and video better than the N95.

The key enabler for this ability is a piece of software from Nokia called ‘Share Online‘. In essence it allows you to upload photos and videos to Flickr, or Nokia’s Ovi server or to any other service out there that offers a simple XML file with definitions. It is a great application that turns the phone into a veritable news agency. It has a few kinks, specifically the inability to upload more than 6 files at a time or schedule an upload when one is taking place.

I have seen several updates from Nokia discussing a new version of this wonderful application but oddly enough my phone, still among the strongest out there, was not on the list of supported devices. More digging around brought me to this message on the application’s discussion board, originating from a person on Nokia’s development team:

Hi MKR10001 and speedgrapher,

Unfortunately, the designers of Share Online took a dependency upon a feature of S60 v3 fp2 back in
version 3.1 of Share Online, and this has meant that no subsequent version can run on v3 fp1 devices.

So, I am sorry to tell you, that Share Online 4.3 will not be available for fp1 devices.

I appologize on behalf of Nokia. In the future, we are going to make a greater effort to make more thoughtful architectural decisions so that we don’t automatically exclude existing customers this way.

Thanks,
Larry
PM, Ovi Share Clients
Nokia US

For the uninitiated, the N95 runs Nokia’s Symbian Series 60 operating system version 3, with feature pack 1, or ‘fp1’. If you did not get it so far, like the multitude of N95 users, we are virtually screwed. While on a single application, in this marketplace where Nokia is under virtual siege at the smartphone level, do they really want to alienate its dedicated clients? Apparently, they do not care enough. Let’s move the next piece of plastic instead of enhance the experience on this really expensive phone you bought.

Really not great.

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General

iMovie Tip: How to rename projects

I am new to iMovie, Apple’s iLife video editing application. It is pretty darn awesome and in many many ways is better than Windows Movie Maker. More than anything, it is fun to work with and is very intuitive. Except for one thing: how do you rename projects after it was created.

Amazingly enough, the project properties window does not have that option. Instead, you need to locate the Project Library button on the upper left corner of the application’s window. In the window that will slide out, double click the name of the project that you want to change. Enter the new name and press return and you are good to go.

Maybe I am just stupid. Probably.

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DoubleTwist not living up to promise

DVD Jon is a great guy to some, evil to others. Responsible for cracking DVD DRM schemes right and left, he decided to pursue new challenges and is now leading development on a Mac-only application called doubleTwist (sic) that aims to seamlessly transfer files, encode and transcode, from your Mac to virtually any device. Great idea, especially to owners of Nokia devices burdened with dreadful software to support the phones. While Nokia’s software on the Mac is far better than the bulk and heft on the PC, it is far from great and hence I was eager to try double Twist.

doubleTwist looks nice and simple; very much like iPhoto and without the clutter and noise of iTunes. It tries to incorporate social features which I had a problem understanding their use. Probably sharing media sometime in the future, maybe file sharing – who knows?

My test was pretty demanding: transfer a video to my N95-8GB phone. It failed. Twice. I was using a MP4 AVI file and well, it told me it was done but nothing really happened. The phone was initially not detected by doubleTwist (it was by the Mac) but reading a support forum posting I changed the connection type on my device to Mass Storage which fixed that issue. Still, no files were transferred.

Another test was connecting it to my PSP. Again, same video file (that works fine on the Mac and on a PC) – and again doubleTwist appears to be doing something but in fact nothing really happened.

Both devices are on the product’s website as fully supported (N95 is a Symbian S60 Series 3 phone; PSP is there outright).

I hope it improves sometime in the future – premise is interesting – but for now, a fail.

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