Video – Enavigo

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.

Nokia N95-8GB: First odd tidbit

I recently purchased a Nokia N95-8GB (aka Nokia N95-4) because I wanted a phone capable of taking really good photos that I could easily share over a 3G network. It achieves these tasks with aplomb. Still, the more I use the phone the more I feel, like I did when I tried out the Nokia E71, that the mindblowing hardware is being sold way short by the cludgy OS, Symbian S60 v.3. It is slow, its multi-tasking is mediocre and the user interface is just outdated. I often wonder is anyone tested the phone in a usability lab.

I plan to share on this blog moments from my life with this otherwise amazing device. I should have read the manual. I intend to. I am a busy guy so sometimes I will clearly should have RTFM.

Today’s tidbit – downloadable videos: I stumbled across the video service download capability of the phone in its Video Center application. You can tell the phone which services you want to get updates on available

e content from – using a special website the phone connects to. Once selected, the phone fetches recent videos available, probably from an RSS feed. The video downloads very quickly – a 1 minute long video downloads in about 1.5 minutes. The quality is great.

Once you’re done watching, though, and we’re talking about a device with 8GB of memory but no way to expand on that memory, there is NO way to delete the video you have just viewed. There is also no information about whether that video will be deleted automatically. If you read the help file, that is easily accessible, it tell you that the video is saved to another section of the video center, ‘My Videos’. It’s a relief to know that. But why? Why can I not just delete the video right there from the list of videos in which it appears? Does not make sense.