Live blogging a wedding with a Nokia N90

I had a wedding appointment arrive rather quickly last week. For some reason I thought the wedding was in about two weeks time, but after speaking to the Bride-to-be to confirm .. and then cross checking my diary, there was no denying it: I was Staffordshire bound.

I had a chat with my younger brother and asked if I could borrow his Nokia N90 for the weekend. He’s recently become smitten by the Motorola V3x, which, I have to admit, is a bit of a sexy-mother — so the pain of handing over his N90 was mellowed.

Warned by Fraser that the N90 had the battery-capacity of a squashed grape, I also took the charger with me. Prior to leaving, I set-about connecting it via Bluetooth to the Apple and synched my contacts. Alas this took ages. Minutes and minutes and minutes. At least 10 minutes — to transfer 500 contacts. Not good. Not good at all. The Sony Ericsson does a fresh sync in about 60 seconds. The other thing I had to do was configure the N90 for T-mobile: A simple task if you’re a Nokia user. There’s a setup facility on their site which is invaluable. Simply select your country, mobile operator, type in your number and bish-bash-bosh, the relevant settings are delivered to your handset and you’re ready to rock.

On the M6 motorway, I took a picture as the car went through the toll booth (I wasn’t driving). Doing any sort of GPRS or 3g data on the move is appalling. This isn’t the handset. The handset is slightly to blame though: it takes pictures at high resolution which, all told, come to between 200-400k in file size. So, when attached to an email to flickr, you’re asking a heck of a lot for that to be sent in one go when you’re speeding along at 70mph.

It’s damn frustrating sitting there holding the N90 waiting for the network to mess around. It connects and it starts sending the data package. You see a little bar move a few notches along to indicate progress on the phone screen. Woooooooops then it all stops. It all stops because we’ve driven out of that cell area. Arse. Now it’s got to reconnect. 20-30 seconds later, the bar begins to move a few more notches as progress continues… JUST as we drive out of that cell area…. gahhhhhhhhh how annoying.

So, my ‘live blogging’ of the weekend wasn’t going well.

I then set about using the N90’s video camera option to film a small sequence of video. It was my plan to whack the video straight up to my Moblog.co.uk account for all and sundry to see. No go. Not with a 2meg video. I just couldn’t stay in a mobile cell long enough to get anything uploaded, GRPS or 3g.

So I gave up until I got to the hotel.

Which had an even shitter mobile signal.

I am absolutely spoilt walking about here in the central London area where there’s a continuously super signal (four bars plus) in almost any location and where a poor signal is both an abberation and a curious short term delight.

The N90 was limping along as I willed it to upload my emails. What a shame — wicked technology brought to its knees by very poor signals.

The wedding ceremony was held in a very small, quaint church in the middle of Staffordshire — more or less in the Midlands of the United Kingdom. The sort of place where, if you don’t stand within line-of-sight of the mobile transmitter all you can do with your phone is make emergency calls. If that.

So I was reduced to simply taking photos and videos without any hope at all of being able to get them out to the web live. The priest conducting the service asked everyone to turn off their mobile phones prior to the ceremony starting. I understood his perspective but there was really no need. I wasn’t even getting a carrier band on the handset. Such is country life, eh?

One thing that did annoy me with the N90 was the task of emailing a picture. On the Sony Ericsson, you select the picture, select send, select email… then my ‘ewanflickr’ address is shown as a recently used address. Smart, right? Well the Nokias don’t seem to do this. Every damn time I came to whack an email image off to Flickr I had to manually type in ‘e…w…a…’ then scroll down to the ewanflickr address.

I suppose you’re meant to use their Lifeblog service.

Anyway the video on the N90 is nothing short of brilliant.

I am extremely impressed. We’re not talking DVD quality… but we’re not talking crappy quality either. I loved the ability to flick open the screen and twist it. The device then automatically makes itself ready to record (or take a pic) within 1.5 seconds. So when I saw something interesting happening at the ceremony or throughout the day… woosh… out came the N90 and I was recording moments later.

At one point, I heard the photographer ask for the wedding party to raise a cheer for one last photograph. While he arranged everyone I flicked out the N90 and switched it on. Brilliance! I captured the moment:

Download Video037.mp4
(Quicktime will handle this fine, it’s only 688k in size)

As you can see it’s excellent quality picture and sound. This is a mobile phone, we’re talking about 😉 352 x 288 pixel resolution as well.

There were a number of my friends who couldn’t make it and were sat with baited breath waiting for me to update my blog with the videos and images. Alas I wasn’t able to do so because of the poor network quality. But, the fact that you COULD… the fact that this device allows you to shoot over an hour of video on a 1gig little memory stick and then zoom it off to the web, it fills me full of excitement for the industry.

How long before everyone’s handset is capable of this?

There were a few chaps wandering around with video cameras. How annoying, I thought. You see I was recording for a moment, then stopping.. choosing scenes and moments to capture. They were then nicely organised and ready for re-play or sending immediately. There’s no screwing about with one long data source. Definitely the future.

One or two of my friends have mobiles that can do video. Well, hold on, almost anyone with a camera-enabled phone can do video. But, let’s face it, generally speaking, the video is a load of shit. It’s either too small, too blocky, too shitty, or more often than not, a mass of block pixels moving incoherently with a roar of audio. You need a friend to explain what you’re meant to be seeing 😉 Once or twice friends have sent a mobile video in the last few months – in place of a picture. I’m encouraged by this.

Judging by the reactions of many of the people I’ve shown the wedding videos to, it won’t be long before we’re a nation of video-phoners, not just camera-phoners.

More points on the N90. Yes, it’s big. Big big big. It weighs down your suit jacket when you’ve got it in the pocket.

However, it does cover your mouth when you’re talking on it. I like this. I don’t like talking into mid-air with the phone held up at my ear. So the size counts for a lot for me. The screen is perfect, the device is well made. And guess what? The battery was fine. I didn’t have a problem with it.

Fraser most probably wants this one back soon so I will seriously consider bidding for an N90 on ebay shortly.