Muvees

One of the most fun bits of the Movie Director application on Symbian phones such as the N73 is the ability to make Muvees, micromovies that can be compressed into a multimedia message (MMS) and sent to your friends' phones just like a text.
To make a Muvee, select a video or image in the Gallery, click Edit and go to Create muvee. It will list a number of styles, ready-made edgings and background music to create various moods from Funsterish to Serenity. Then you can add text at the beginning and end, and merge in still images and other videos.
Press Create Muvee and a few seconds later, it is ready for transmission. Once you have found your way round the menus, Muvees can be run up in minutes.
To show what a Muvee looks like, I created one from the video of Gerty Guineapig. In fact, it is a Gerty Muvee (say that out loud).
The quality is...what camera makers call 'fun', ie total pants, but if grandmum gets a Muvee of grandkids playing on the beach, is she going to complain? She'll alter her will in their favour directly.
Longer, better quality Muvees can also be created but they must be transmitted by email, Bluetooth, web upload or WiFi if you have it.

Video on the N73

Most cameraphones produce pretty rubbish videos, but the N73 uses MPEG4, the latest standard using very advanced compression so reasonable quality videos can be made without filling up the memory card for 30 seconds of your children trampolining or whatever, but showable on the computer screen without too much embarrassment.

For test purposes, I took a silly video of our family guineapig and uploaded it to MySpace. Here's a snapshot taken from it - one of the nice editing functions of the N73, particularly useful as Blogger won't let me upload videos directly to the blog.
The quality is really rather good - I had to endure much, much worse when Mr Bloke with the House in the South of France forced us to watch his holiday home movies when I was a kid.
Editing the video on the phone was a bit fiddly but not difficult. Cutting the video was awkward - the instructions say to click on the start and finish points and then click 'cut', without explaining that the section between the points is retained, and the rest is cut. Not obvious, but having realised that the process of cutting the video was simple.
The instructions also fail to point out that you have to add titles and credits after you have made the cuts, as they are removed in the process.
Despite these quibbles, the editing is simple and it is clearly possible to get results easily good enough for U-Tube.
You can also add a sound track or background music, but I haven't worked out how yet. More tests and a new silly video tomorrow.

N95 in action

I went to Madrid for the Symbian S60 conference this week, and borrowed a Nokia N95 for the occasion - S60 is the computer operating system used in the phone.
The evening was spent at a fiesta place in the hills above the city, with a miniature bullring where traditional Castillian riders put their firey stallions through their paces - literally, walking sideways and backwards, galloping round the ring and rearing.
It was a severe test for any camera, let alone a cameraphone, with fast-moving subjects in the low light of the evening sun.
The N95 has a 5 megapixel image sensor, so it should be capable of taking sharper pictures than mid-range dedicated cameras. And it performed nobly, but at the edge of its capabilities.
For a start, the delay while the autofocus got its act together meant I lost a lot of shots, including this one - the rider was well inside the ring when I pressed the button.Some shots are also a little blurred, because of the low light and possibly a bit of camera shake.The colours were rather subdued as well, but the cameraphone correction in Microsoft Digital Image Pro did a good job of brightening the images.
The lesson I took away was that cameraphones still have a little way to go to rival dedicated digital cameras in low light or with fast moving subjects.
This is one of my favourites - the riders waiting to enter the ring.Equine flashing:No bulls were hurt:

Return of the bananaphone

Motorola has launched a new phone that resurects the old bananaphone shape, but with a twist: when closed, it is an ordinary candybar shape. Only when you slide the keyboard out, does the phone morph into a curve that is said to fit your face better.
It is very cool and bound to be another fashion winner for Moto. But for cameraphone fans, it is a bit of a let down as it rates just 2 megapixels. What a pity.

Do megapixels really count?

David Pogue has been having a swipe at megapixel mania, in an article called Breaking the Myth of Megapixels in the New York Times. Beyond about 5MP, picture quality does not get much better and you get all sorts of other problems, Pogue rightly points out. He even does a couple of tests showing that the average person in the street can't distinguish between pictures taken at 7MP, 10MP and a massive 16.7MP. The method used to take the images is open to criticism but he makes a valid point.
So I thought I would take a little test of my own to see what difference pixel count makes on mobile phones.
I took the Nokia N73 that I have on trial, and assembled a little still life (quite Baroque, I think). Then I took three shots, moving out each time and using the digital zoom to frame the same shot. The digital zoom does not actually zoom at all - all it does is select the middle of the image and blow it up to fit the screen, so the resolution effectively goes down by several notches. Unfortunately, I can't tell exactly how much from the manual.The first image is really quite good. Lots of detail and nice colour, considering it was taken by the light of the dining room and the phone's flash. Cameraphones still suffer badly in low light:The second is visibly not as good but still acceptable if you are partially sighted:
The third is what professional photographers call complete pants (but still better than any VGA crapcam:
One of the things about digital images is that you can instantly blow them up to any magnification to examine every little flaw. So I printed all the images out on 6x4 photo paper. Interestingly, the full resolution image was only a bit better than the one taken with the digital zoom at the halfway point. The full digital zoom image was still pants. As ever, the quality depends on the medium to a great degree.
Clearly, cameraphones have some way to go before 'megapixels don't matter'. Cameraphones also have a harder job than 'proper' digital cameras because the lenses are so much smaller and optical zooms are rare.
The advice at the moment has to be never to use the digital zoom unless you want to send the image directly from the phone to your blog or a friend. If you are going to download the picture to a PC, take it at full resolution and edit the image on the PC.

Lenses made of water and oil?

It sounds bizarre, but liquid lenses could be the future of cameraphones. They have been proposed for ages, by Philips among others, but French company Varioptic and Chinese optical company Sunny have produced a module that they hope will appear in cameraphones soon.
Liquid lenses work by holding a drop of oil inside a metal ring, held in place by water. When a voltage is applied to the ring, the water is drawn along it to compress the oil into a spherical droplet - that is, a lens.
Varying the voltage instantly changes the shape of the oil droplet, changing the focal length. Both autofocus and zoom lenses are possible.
The advantages of using liquid are very small size and high speed compared with mechanical arrays. They are also cheap.
The Varioptic module is only 2MP, so it will not be competing with the top glass lens systems. Recent experience has shown that cameraphones can only compete with regular cameras by using top quality lenses, glass rather than plastic, so it will be interesting to see if liquid lenses rule the world or become a cheapo alternative for happy-snappy phones.

Is it a phone? Is it a laptop? Is it a camera?

I've long felt that cameraphones are going to morph in two directions - phones with cameras and cameras with phones. Here's a third alternative - a micro-laptop with a phone. From HTC, which supplies most of the networks with smartphones, the HTC Advantage is a tablet-style computer with a 5in diagonal screen. As shown, it plugs into a keyboard so you can easily type documents, and the touch screen allows easy navigation.
The camera on this side is a tv quality camera for making video calls, but the other side sports a 3MP camera. This is a really powerful combination - you can really see your images properly on the 5in screen, though there is no indication whether you can do any useful editing before uploading.
The unit is a full 3G phone, with HSDPA, Bluetooth and WiFi, so the photoblogger is fully equipped for any connection on offer. The HTC Advantage should be available in March with T-Mobile under the Ameo brand.

Samsung's 5 megapixel phone

The current 'norm' for a decent cameraphone is a 3.2MP resolution. But that is set to go up to 5MP very soon, when phones such as Nokia's N95 and Samsung's amazing Ultra Smart F700 arrive.
The F700 has a huge 2.8in touch screen and a slide-out keypad similar to several recently-launched smartphones.
In theory, it should be a photoblogger's dream - very high quality images from the 5MP camera, some basic picture editing, plus relatively easy typing.
It will be fascinating to try one. The main fear is that the 5MP images will actually be a step backwards. Packing so many pixels into a limited area of silicon can allow neighbouring pixels to interfere with each other, a process known as crosstalk, which can cause fuzziness. And very high resolution can simply expose lens defects, which is why the major phone manufacturers have been sourcing their optics from leading lens makers such as Schneider and Leica recently.
The massive amounts of data in a 5MP image could also pose problems when uploading via the mobile networks, which is likely to be time-consuming and very expensive. The phone supports the new HSDPA high speed download system, but that doesn't help with uploads. No WiFi either, so you can't even find a hotspot and upload from there.
And the phone is a beast of a thing to carry around. Must get one to try out later this year - they should be in the shops mid-year.

Samsung's Thinphone

Samsung has launched a phone it claims is the world's thinnest, at under 6mm, and it also packs a 3MP camera. At last, a cameraphone that slips into a pocket without what Harold Steptoe memorably described as "unsawtly bulges in ver trahzers".
Unfortunately, the phone is not 3G so uploading pictures to your blog will take a while, and frequent upload may be necessary because it has no memory card slot (though it does have a generous 70 megabyte built-in memory).

Place your pictures by satellite

The Nokia 6110 Navigator phone announced today has satellite navigation built in. For most, this means finding your way without having to bother with maps, which is clinically proven to rot the brain. But the phone also has a 2MP camera, so you can add GPS coordinates and even the direction the camera is pointing to each shot when you upload it to your blog. The disadvantage might be that it would give your stalker a trail to follow.....

Nokia updates the Communicator - with camera

Mobiles for business have traditionally been camera-free because employers don't want to tool up their staff for industrial espionage, but everyone demands cameras so the security guys have had to retreat. The latest convert is Nokia's shiny new E90 Communicator, the latest in the company's long line of phones that look like tiny laptops. For the first time, the E90 has a camera, and it is a good one at 3.2 megapixels. The phone itself looks good too, with a bright, high resolution screen that can be folded part-way back or flat, depending on how you like to use it. The phone also has High Speed Data Packet Access (HSDPA) built in, which will offer higher speed downloads.