It’s a little bit crazy over here. I spent a whole day trying with a computer specialist to figure out a way to hook a wireless router to my ADSL connection so I can enjoy all the benefits of WiFi at home. Well it didn’t work.
I won’t bore you with the details of this fruitless day. Let’s get to the juicy part: here is the last report from my N95 8GB Lebanon Ambassador mission covering day 12, 13 and 14 or the use of the Music Store, catching RSS and viewing & editing documents. Previous reports can be found here: Day 1 & 2, Day 3 & 4, Day 5, Day 6, 7 & 8 and Day 9, 10 & 11.
Day 12 – Nokia Music Store
The whole concept of buying music is against the Lebanese mentality, seriously. There might be like 3-5% of Lebanese music fans who actually go to music stores in order to buy original CDs. The others? Well, it’s not mostly internet download like you would think. It’s a 10 step walk to the music store around the corner who can rip you a copy of any original CD for 1-2$ or even custom rip you a CD with any songs for 5$ or less. For others, it’s the stop at the red light with the illegal sellers (from a nearby country) wandering between the cars shouting to whom it may concern that they have the latest albums on a compressed CD, which means you can grab an a CD with 10-12 of the newest albums in MP3 format for the mere sum of 2-3$. Heck, I even found a store that sells 4gb DVDs filled with music in MP3 format for less than 2$! But that’s an extremist.
So you imagine it was kinda tough for me to demonstrate a Music Store with each song being priced somewhere around a dollar to a crowd used to getting it for less than a penny. In order to grab some attention, I talked about Nokia’s Comes With Music announcement. You bet I got some interest then: if it’s not even a penny they’re paying, then they’re ready to roll.
The whole idea of being able to access a music store from your device, search, browse and download was very welcomed. I demonstrated the access to the music store, and downloaded the free song of the week with a matter of minutes. I was annoyed by the different pages I had to browse in order to start browsing music but once I reached the actual store, everything went nice and smooth. The whole site is scaled down to look terrificly fit on the device’s screen, kudos for that. The download was slow but I can only blame the jammed WiFi network for that.
The only question I got was “when will Comes With Music be available?”, ha, you think you’ve interested people with your skills, turns out it’s the”free” word that hooked them up. My opinion about it is that if Nokia can manage to launch a middle eastern store and roll at least Rotana for the Comes With Music service (they have already collaborated on the Rotana Player so why not?) then they’ve definitely got a winner on their hands. Says who? Me and everyone I talked to.
Day 13 – Catching RSS
If you are a blog writer or a tech addict, then you know that you should skim through 200-300 feed items everyday. Normally I catch all of those at 7pm, when I am back home from an 8am to 7pm day at college. Not the most productive time of my day, but what can I do? Having the N95 8GB with WiFi meant that I could take a 10 minute noon stop at the college’s cafeteria to log into Google Reader to catch the morning items and star the ones I should check later at home. A bliss! Problems? I would like Google Reader mobiles to include more than 10 new items on its main page.
Now off to the demonstration. In order to demonstrate RSS catching to people, I had to go through the explanation of the whole concept of RSS. Talking about that “orange icon” got me a couple of frowns or cheers (the orange color has a certain political meaning in Lebanon). But other than that I noticed that they were mostly impressed by the whole idea. Being able to check the news on their favorite sites without having to load the whole page or read the old items got me a couple of smiles. Then I took the N95 8GB out of my pocket and launched Google Reader. I know that most of the “wow factor” of this day was due to the concept of RSS and Google Reader, but I am also sure that the speed of WiFi over the N95 8GB and its good range, as well as the big comfy screen and the amazingly easy to use browser are the factors that made the whole experience smooth and easy. I understand that not too many persons in my entourage may need RSS now, but one day they all will, and when that day comes, they will remember me and my lovely N95 8GB. Point made.
Day 14 – Office Documents
Since N-Gage was not launched, I was meant to demonstrate the Mobile Web Browser, Internet Radio or Podcasts, but due to the strict WiFi environment in my college, I couldn’t do any of those. So I was left with one day and one feature to demonstrate. I went through it all, nothing, then suddenly while reading the N95 8Gb Lebanon Ambassador.doc file I had placed on the device for day to day update, I realized that was the feature that would fill day 14.
Many persons around me have an Nseries. They have all seen the QuickOffice icon but I can speak truly if I say that 90% never tried to see what that does. Silly. I loaded a couple of text files and presentations onto the N95 8GB (we use Excel once a decade). Of course every single file loaded like it should, with tables, pictures, fonts rendering quite remarkably compared to the desktop. I have previously used QuickOffice on the 3250, but it’s nothing compared to the better resolution and larger screen of the N95 8GB.
Besides the large screen that, despite a QVGA res, delivers an eye-candy document, I enjoyed 2 features that only the N82 can offer now: TV-Out and screen rotation. TV-Out made viewing documents an extraordinary experience. I understand now people who say that the N95 8GB can replace a laptop. It can. With RotateMe on, viewing documents with tables and images and especially presentations, was made even better by a simple manual rotation of the device. Love it!
I got a couple of questions as to whether I could edit these documents. I did explain I would need to update the software for something around 40-50$ in order to access the Edit feature. A major letdown. Please Nokia, make a deal with QuickOffice and hook us up with the full version of the software out-of-the-box. You could charge us with 10-20$ more for each device without us even knowing, and we would appreciate you a lot more.
That’s it for this report. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome. Stay tuned tomorrow for a final word and a crazy question.
Widsets is a great application to follow your newsfeeds. I have been using it from the day I bought my N95 8GB and I am very satisfied.
That last one is a doozie ain’t it. Being able to do TV-Out with some office documents work is kinda neat. That’s one of those paradigm shifting moments that I’d love to see Nokia push a lot more.
u said n82 by mistake on day 14. Freudian slip on the next device to get your hands on? ;p
no i meant n82 :p i was saying that besides the n95 8gb, the only device to offer this is the n82
couldnt the n93 do tv out?
Yup but i was talking about 2 features: TV-out AND automatic rotation… if i’m not mistaken, the N93 can’t auto-rotate with rotateme. Or does it have an accelerometer that i don’t know about? Totally forgot, can someone enlighten me?