ESPOO, Finland – It’s no secret that one of the most hotly anticipated features of the new Nokia N8 is the 12-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics. The second of our video walkthroughs shows the photography software bundled with the device. There’s software to view photo albums; to edit your photos and even to create videos while you’re on the move – using multiple clips, text titles and transitions. Lastly, we see how the N8 can interact with mobile storage devices, such as a USB key. Follow the break to see Chris Bennetts, Senior Product Manager, walk you through the picture and video applications.
The photo browsing section gives an indication of how the UI will work on the new device. Swiping and tapping will be the main way to get things done – flicking through a photo album and choosing particular pictures, in this case – while a longer tap reveals a context-sensitive menu of options. Doing this with a photo reveals options to view, edit, tag, send it to a friend and other actions. The power of the high resolution is also revealed, allowing the viewer to focus in on tiny details using a ‘pinch out’ action with your fingers.
Photo-editing allows for the adjustment of photo images, cropping, colour adjustments and adding clipart to create individualised, fun pictures. There’s also an indication of special effect and fine-tuning options that we look forward to seeing more of.
The video editing features offer a story board for putting together clips, titles and transitions in a timeline. Visually, it’s not far away from desktop applications like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. Individual sections of the video can be independently edited and adjusted. There’s a host of transitions and the titles can be edited, moved, rotated and recoloured in the same ways you can in a vector illustration program.
The final section of the video concerns using your Nokia N8 to interact with external media. There’s 16GB of memory on-board, so space shouldn’t be too much of a problem unless you’re planning a Spielberg-esque piece of production. Nonetheless, you’ll want to move your movie masterpieces onto other computers, perhaps for further processing, and ‘over the air’ isn’t always convenient for very large files. Happily, the Nokia N8’s USB slot and adapter cable allows users to directly connect a thumb drive or other removable storage media to the phone, with them appearing as new drives in the same way you’ll be used to on a PC or Mac.
Just a quick note on the format. The intention here is that we’re putting people on camera who have been living and working with the device since its conception. The team at Nokia were really grateful for all the feedback to last week’s post – both praise and criticism – and asked us to mention that this is really important as they continue to optimise the product, services and software until the point at which it goes on sale. In other words: fire away!