Chippy's Hiblue Lab

I’ve just updated my Nokia N8 to Symbian Belle. It’s a worthwhile update that completely changes the user interface over ‘Anna’ and gives it a much simplified, smartphone-like feel. Pull-down control, info and notification bar, a single layer of program panes and more flexibility in organising multiple home screens. The underlying capabilities seem to be much the same as before which is good and bad because you get lots of configuration options but you still have some limitations when it comes to true smartphone features. Still, the camera is the important bit for most N8 owners and buyers and that’s as good as ever. Wouldn’t it be nice though to have a bit more processing power and more improvements in the software layer? The Nokia 803 could be the answer.

More. . .
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This low-light handheld test is important for me as it’s one of my most-used scenarios. I’m also interested in telephoto shots at on-stage press events and various types of video but for my first Panasonic Lumix Z150 test I wanted to see how much better it was than my old (5 year old) Canon S2IS 5MP bridge camera. Of course it’s a massive improvement. I’m estimating a total 8x quality improvement of sensitivity, stabiliser and definition through sensor pixel count and lens. That’s a massive 3 f-stops of usefulness.

All my Lumix FZ150 posts are shown together here.

In this test I took a large number of shots of a multimeter (showing a LUX reading of around 95 from a big 30W daylight-temperature CFL energy-saving bulb 2M away) and chose the best pictures to analyse.

The other two devices used were the Canon S2IS and my Nokia N8 which has a larger sensor than both of the bridge cameras. To help make the images easy to compare I set the ISO at 400 and took the images at about 15 cm, the distance at which the multimeter was full-frame in the non-zoom Nokia N8.

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Nokia have just put another great camera choice on the table for us mobile, always-ready, sharing and of course, caring cameraphone fans. Ignore that fact that this is a Meego phone because it doesn’t really make much difference if all you want is a camera, in a phone, which is primarily what the N8 is.

I’ve had an N8 on loan for an embarrassing amount of months now (thanks Nokia, UK!) and it has slotted well into my life alongside my Samsung Galaxy Tab that I tend to use for a higher-quality Internet experience than is possible on a smartphone. I’ve taken thousands of images and just can not fault the camera hardware. It blows me away time and time again.

But if the N9 brings the same quality phone (SMS, Voice quality, battery life) as the N8 and improves in some other areas like browsing and sharing, then maybe the N9 would be better. There’s a word out there for a luxury decision like this but it feels like a dilemma to me because I know I’ll lose sleep over it!

There the Xenon Flash on the N8 to consider…

But the N9 has a wider-angle lens with true wide-screen sensor layout, continuous auto-focus and 30fps 720p video recording. Apparently it’s the quickest focus-to-shoot cameraphone ever…

The N9 also adds near-field support (at least for some Nokia accessories)…

It doesn’t have the USB OTG support or HDMI port that the N8 has though…

Here we go again!

Does Meego have a role to play in helping us make our decisions though? I can’t really think of any major reasons to choose Meego over Symbian especially as there’s an upgrade coming for the N9 in a month or two that will overhaul the UI and add the CAF and 30fps video recording. The user interface certainly looks nice on Meego. Way better than on the N8 but then will it support all the things I take for granted on the N8 like Exchange support, profiles and other important features.

The only way to find out is to test it out and read reviews. I’ll be getting a little play with the N9 soon so should be able to give you cameraphone fans some feedback then. Until then, enjoy a bunch of N9 links in the new product database I wrote for Meegonews.com

As I look to organise and tag my Flickr images more orderly i’ve been looking for a way to search for photos I shot using different cameras. Using advanced search doesnt give a camera option but I found a way.

Via this post I found that you can search for images from certain cameras so I yanked the search term from the URL and applied it to a search URL that included my user id. It worked so I need to write this down for reference.

Examples:

Searching for all photos of orchids taken with an N82 yields this search URL.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=orchid&cm=nokia%2Fn82

You can see the section “&cm=nokia%2Fn82″ take note of that.

Now a search for orchids from my photos. Note: The 12345678 is not my user ID. I’ve changed it. You’ll see yours when you do your own search.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=orchid&w=12345678%40N00

Now you have your user id, put it together with the camera field  in a new URL so:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=12345678%40N00&cm=nokia%2Fn82

Trala! You’ll find all images taken with an N82. Obviously you’ll need to replace the camera ID. All camera IDs are listed here.

http://www.flickr.com/cameras/

Have fun.

I’ve been away for the last two weeks. I took two smartphones and a netbook with me which is a slightly different setup to my usual phone/umpc/netbook combo. Fortunately I wasn’t caught-out on my outings where all I took were my smartphones but I was conscious of having to do any sort of site support with just a touchscreen phone! I took my X10i and my N82 as phone companions and the N82 was about the only device I used as a camera although I did find myself doing a few shots with the X10 just because it was easier to tweet / send to Facebook and that’s one of the features I really love using on Android. The sharing ‘bus’ that allows any application to link into the ‘share’ menu and get a message from an application is just killer.

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