David Emery OnlineEvery dog has its day
27 September 2006
Nokia have just launched the N95 and boy, is it a good phone! The headline feature has to be the 5 megapixel camera, which is just stunning – essentially killing at a swoop the low range digital camera market (at least it will when it trickles down to cheaper phones).
What’s possibly more interesting, though, is the inclusion of GPS meaning that the device can tell where it is at any one time. This has the knock-on effect that any pictures you take automatically get tagged with the location you took them! Couple this with a large QVGA screen and also the ability to do 640×480, 30fps video and you start to get a window into where mobile tech is going; it’s going somewhere interesting.
So, now we have all this technology in our pocket, what effects does that have? We can now record high quality video on-the-go; we don’t have to cart around a bulky camcorder or much around with tapes – we’ve got the camcorder on us all the time. The repercussions of that I think could be huge – for a start, if you think YouTube is popular now I think phones like this could change the game again – ditto for videoblogs.
While video blogs are hard to scan easily, they are so much easier to produce. From YouTube we’ve now learnt that video quality and professionalism are not things that people really care too much about, which means that when compared to sitting down and writing a blog post (for example) videoblogging is so much easier; just take your phone out and press record.
Of course, this all couples with connectivity which is the other piece of the puzzle – the N95 (like most high end phones) comes with WiFi and 3G so getting those videos and pictures of your phone and onto the net is easy and instant.
While I know mobile has been the “next big thing” now for quite a while (don’t forget the furore around WAP…), I think maybe – just maybe – it’s time may have come.