You'll be seeing this stage in action during the rest of the week
Long time readers will remember that, when I attended the 2009 Contest, I talked about the software and how your smartphone could follow the contest, but this time around, Steve has asked me to look at what improvement the N8 has made to someone attending a major event and how the Symbian smartphone can help capture the moment, be it for personal memories, posing online, or using in the mainstream media.
Let's start with the biggest element, the camera. According to Steve, even I should be able to take some memorable stills with the camera (although I've been told to print out and carry last week's tutorial)...
Certainly the N8 is easy to get ready to take a picture - the now expected long hold on the camera button means that I can start the application as the phone comes out of my pocket. As long as it's been left running in the background, settings for the Flash, the image mode, and others will still be set.
Looking at the images, many of them are spur of the moment - there are only a handful of organised photo opportunities, so taking pictures of the stars is very much down to being at the right place, at the right time, and then staying very calm to steady the camera, lock the focus and gently squeeze the shutter button.
Let's talk about one of those "snap shots", with Stella Mwangi, who'll be singing for Norway. Making a quick visit to the Euroclub, she posed for a brief minute with a number of fans. Here's the image I managed to grab, resized only to fit on this page.
Stella Mwangi at the Euroclub
Steve is more than likely ready to tell me what I've done wrong, but the delight here is that it's very much an 'everyman' shot with the N8. After some cropping, colour sliders tweaked (and a failure to have the red-eye effect work perfectly) this comes out, and is far better for uploading to the likes of Facebook and Twitter. And the original image is unaffected, so it can be worked on.
Same shot, with crop and effects tweaked
Video editing 'in the field'
One of the things that is always happening during the Eurovision fortnight is impromptu performances by the many bands and singers here. Chances are that if you're at a club or party and there's a stage or PA, you'll get a rendition of their song (they even perform their songs during the press conferences). So random performances, that could happen wherever you are? Perfect for a portable HD video camera!
I still can't see a way to edit the order of "chunks" in the Video Editor, for example to change around the playback order of a series of videos. A bit of planning and adding the videos in the right order is needed, but I reckon a simple drag and drop option is needed (or if it is lurking somewhere in the menu, it needs to be a lot more obvious).
But it does do the job, and you can run clips together with some text. The file size might cause problems if you go for an upload to Facebook over a 3G signal because of the bandwidth needed, but there's nothing to stop you holding back till you get into WiFi range.
There's no question that the N8 can produce broadcast quality (720p) TV, but if you are filming with a view to going on air then it probably has to go through another editing pass at the TV Centre, so you'll likely be asked to upload the raw video file in any case. You must make sure though that you use a tripod (Ewan didn't, sadly! - Ed]) - camera shake is fine for your memories, but not for BBC News 24.
There's also something very useful about the HDMI output, and that's instant analysis of a rehearsal. Even though the press room has HD TV's scattered around showing the live feed from the stage, there's no such thing as an instant replay. Never fear though, with the N8 I can record the failure of a glass box to explode around the Swedish singer, and the ranks of journalists and bloggers can look really closely at that and the other rehearsals.
The biggest let down for me, controversially, is audio recording. While Nokia have made huge strides in imaging with Carl Zeiss, the audio options, and while the on device MEMS microphone provides a crisp sound which is great for personal videos it still leaves me looking for a little bit more. I think that I'm in the same mental place as someone with a range of camera lenses being handed the "point and shoot" styling of the Nokia N8. As someone who is known for audio podcasts, I can't abandon my audio kit for the N8 just yet. What I'd love to see is an adaptor to allow some standard microphone jacks to be plugged in to the N8 to get some high quality recording, or drivers added to the firmware that will allow the latest USB microphones to be used in conjunction with the N8, either as a straight audio recorder or to augment the HD video recording.
But unlike other devices, if all I had was the Nokia N8 to do my audio recording, then I know that I can get sufficient quality that will be acceptable to the majority of casual listeners. This is useful for applications such as Audioboo, which is great for getting short clips uploaded into an RSS feed for reportage style podcasting. I'm looking for more long form interviews that I can edit afterwards before posting.
Some Final Thoughts
Running around with the N8 does give you an appreciation for the little things in the life of your smartphone. After the first day, I wasn't that worried about battery life, with the N8 happily making it through the day and snapping a bundle of pictures and videos, although to be fair it is staying in offline-wifi only mode, thanks to the crazy roaming data charges I don't want to run up. That does give the battery a longer effective life, but even at the end of the day it's still showing three bars of charge - and that's before using an external charging battery pack to top it up.
And when I see the visiting Android and Apple bloggers fret about the data being used to populate their map application, it's a delight to know that the entire Dusseldorf map, points of interest, public transport stops and favourite locations have been synced to the N8 with local data (back in Edinburgh) so I can stay offline and still have everything at my fingertips.
The general advantages of the N8 that we've talked about before on All About Symbian are magnified when you take the phone into a high pressure environment such as covering Eurovision (or any other 14 day long music festival or sporting event). But the special features, the big stand outs that help sell the device... they really do work!
-- Ewan Spence, May 2011.