After tons of chatter for the past year or so, Nokia has finally launched the first beta of its Nokia Point & Find system, which enables you to use your phone’s camera to snap a picture of real-life objects and get relevant information about them. Unfortunately, the service is only active in the UK and US, and you’ll need one of the limited number of smartphones supported, which includes the N82, N95, N95 8GB, N76, N81, N81 8GB, E51, E66, 6290, 6124 Classic, 6161 Classic, 6120 Classic, 6110 Navigator and 5700 XpressMusic. Of course I don’t have any of those phones here, so I can’t give you a live video demo.
Nokia Point & Find currently supports two things – movie posters and barcodes. The movie poster setup is simple enough – snap a picture of the movie poster, and Nokia Point & Find will figure out what movie it is, and return results right there on your phone, such as showtimes, ratings, a link to watch the trailer, etc. Definitely pretty cool, it also integrates with Nokia Maps to give you directions to the theatre, if you go for the tickets option.
The barcode feature is, in my opinion, much cooler. This supposedly allows you to snap a photo of any barcode, even on a can of beans at the grocery store. The software will read the barcode, search the internet, and return with product information, including online prices at various online retailers. On second though, perhaps a can of beans wouldn’t be the best example. Try it with a CD at Best Buy, instead. This is definitely something that’s been needed in the S60 community for a while now, glad to see Nokia bringing it for free, though I wish they’d support more countries/handsets.
You can get more information at pointandfind.Nokia.com. (Image courtesy of Nokia Conversations)
