Ms. Jen Proves NokiaviNe Might Be OK
One of my hesitations around using applications such as Nokia viNe is battery usage. The application is designed to track your movement, as well as photos, videos, and music you listen to while on a trip or a walk or something. I (and most of you, I’m sure) would be most likely to use such an application while travelling, which is also the time in which battery power becomes increasingly important.
I issued a challenge for anyone able to use Nokia viNe to test the phone in two scenarios – using the built-in Geotagging feature, and using Nokia viNe. Ms. Jen took me up on the challenge over at DarlaMack.com, and I’m honestly quite surprised to see the results.
Opting for a mostly-scientific method, Ms. Jen used the Nokia Energy Profiler application to keep track of the battery usage with different applications running. Based on her findings, it looks as though, somehow, Nokia viNe uses *less* battery power than simply geotagging your photos. As you can see in the below screenshots, using the built-in geotagging features on her Nokia N82, she experienced battery drains of more than 2 watts. In the same situation, using Nokia viNe, the usage is easily under 2 watts, with a small spike at one point.
Using the N82’s built-in Geotagging feature:
Using Nokia viNe on the N82:
Based on this, I’m much more open to the idea of using an application such as Nokia viNe when out and about on my travels. What do you think? Is it still questionable, or did you think I was being difficult anyways?
You should know that, NokiaviNe in its present build does NOT geo-tag the images that you take. Atleast on the build I’m on. It uploads seperate 640×480 duplicate images of the ones you take, which isnt geo-tagged either. Seems like the application records the name of the picture/video you take, and the coordinates, and matches them up when its displayed within the application and uploaded to the NokiaviNe site. I’m not a hundred percent sure though. But none of the images I’ve taken with it have been geo-tagged unless I’ve chosen to do so within the N82’s Camera application.
@Cj – Thanks for chiming in. That’s interesting information, for sure. Without a public build (of an application that was announced almost a month ago), obviously we don’t have much information. However, if my photos only show on the timeline in the Nokia viNe service area, that’s rather useless.
All my pics get dumped onto Share on Ovi, so it sounds like I’m sticking with the built-in geotagging features for now.
mmm, I’m guessing here but my explanation is the following:
when Ms. Jen used the geotagging feature the mobile did not have a gps fix (when taking each picture), so when the agps started the mobile initiated a data connection which is probably why you have such a high energy consumption in the logs.
I guess you could prove this by running sport tracker in the background and see if you get the same results
Hi Ricky –
The reason I said mostly-scientific is that in the original comment thread where you asked me to test the batteries, I asked you back which method you wanted me to use for the geo-tagging. Since I did not hear back from you (thread was probably too old at that point), I went with the way that I have used to get the geo-points in the past.
CJ & Reda – The Nokia viNe app is just the Sports Tracker app with a new “face/skin” and UI, it operates the basically way as the mobile SP app does in terms of taking the path you take and registering the photos as points and then it sends the photos & video one takes to the one’s sportstracker.nokia.com account. That is the mobile app and how it is lodged on the nokia server, when I log into my Sports Tracker account, the information looks not different than when I use the Sports Tracker mobile app.
Now the Nokia viNe marketing campaign that is up at the Nseries website at http://www.nseries.com/nseries/nokiavine/ is basically a re-purposed and re-iterated version of the Urbanista Diaries campaign on the nseries.com account. Both of these campaigns are using Flash to present the photos (and video & music in the case of viNe) with the Map. Both of the nseries Flash mini-sites are then scraping the RSS feed from my SportsTracker account (with my permission) to then feed the content to the nseries campaign mini-site.
Thus, I could be using the mobile Sports Tracker to be uploading my photos and path to my sportstracker.nokia.com account and the viNe app would still take the feed and use it. But I haven’t, because I really do prefer the Nokia viNe mobile app interface to the SportsTracker mobile app interface, mostly because I can choose what media I want to send.
Ms Jen – Thanks for chiming in. I really do appreciate you taking the time to check things out, hopefully I didn’t give you a wrong impression. :)
In any case, fascinating stuff, though, as mentioned, if the application isn’t truly geotagging, but only associating photos with points on the line, then I’d DEFINITELY prefer to use the extra juice to get a true geotag, so that it’s useful elsewhere.
I’m a pretty big user of Nokia’s various services, but I don’t like any instance in which that information is only kept intact so long as it’s on Nokia’s servers.
Hi Ricky,
Much like the mobile Sports Tracker application, the mobile Nokia viNe app has its own folder and stores not only the photos as CJ mentions above, but also all the data and geo-tracking-pathing logs. Which are can be saved in kml files which can easily be used again.
When I did the AroundIreland.net project with my grad school team in 2006, we did not have such fancy pants apps and used a Nokia N82 plus a Garmin and then hand coded the kml files we needed.
I have twice spoken with Jussi K. who is the main dev on SportsTracker and have talked to him about how the ability to export the path and photos to servers outside of the Nokia servers would be a great boon to folks with their own blogs who wish to own their own data.
Now it would be easy enough for a developer to take the kml or gsv(?) files that SportsTracker/ Nokia viNe are creating and then be able to create plugin for one’s blog to take the data & photos and then reuse them to map/path in the fashion you want. All we need now is the ability that Lifeblog has, which is to be able to enter the URL of your blog’s Atom script & login into SportsTracker / Nokia viNe.
It behooves Nokia to provide not just hosted services like SportsTracker or Ovi for folks who want it, but also to provide three little inputs (Atom script, username, & password) into their mobile apps for those of us who would like our mobile creations to also or exlusively go to our blogs.
This is what Lifeblog got / gets really right on the mobile app, which is the ability to not only post the content to the co-promote company (Typepad) but also to add your own blog into the blog settings section. If Nokia discontinues the Lifeblog mobile app, I would like to see them Open Source the code so that I, or any other dev, can take it and improve it and keep it going out in the big wide world. (This is an upcoming blog post that I will be posting very soon)
CORRECTION: in 2006 I used a Nokia N80. Not an N82 (Oh, how I wish that was the case…).
The GPS chip in my N95 8GB has given up…
…trying to prove to my carrier that it warrants a new handset.
Fingers crossed!
Oh – and when I get it fixed I’ll shout about NVine too.
Nice post.
@Ms Jen
Sorry, wasn’t very clear when I made the last joke. I meant to say that you could use sport tracker when using the geotagging program and check if you still get the spikes you had in the previous test. I guess you won’t.
Regarding geotagging with SP, I use gpicsync. It would not integrate with your blog, but it does geotag anything (even pics from other cameras), create kml file and you can upload everything to your webhost.
Nokia posted its lifeblog protocol specification when the N95 came out. Surely newer versions will be posted once they are out of beta?
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