For me, the promised addition of Skype to the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet has meant the ability to connect to millions of Skype users for free voip calls — a network far larger than Gizmo and Google Talk offer — and, of course, video internet calls.
Maybe I’ve been missing the boat on this.
A forum post here at ITT alerted us to a post at jkontherun with a photo of Skype running on the N800 and a few pieces of information: July. No video yet.
No cam calls? What’s the point? I thought.
And then I wondered why the photo showed a “Buy Skype credit” link in the app. You only use that when you pay for Skype calls, which is only when you’re calling someone who doesn’t have Skype.
Yikes!
Will I be able to call anyone on any landline or cellphone whatsoever from my Internet Tablet? Looks like it to me.
That, I think, is maybe going to ease my unhappiness at having to wait for Skype cam calls. More than a lot, I should say.
Update: Two days a week I work from home, and I tie up the house phone for an hour at a time with weekly conference calls.
The cellphone reception right where we are (at the bottom of a hill) is poor, else I’d consider our cellphones as alternate home phones.
In the past, we’ve had two lines, but we never knew when we needed the second line and the expense has never seemed justified. But what a pain it is sometimes having just one phone line.
My “use Skype for a second line” and “well, use Gizmo then” efforts were abysmal failures. Maybe it was my cheap headset. But things didn’t work out. And I sure didn’t like being tethered to the upstairs computer anytime I wanted to make a call.
I realize now that my N800 and 770 aren’t two new phones. They’re two new phone lines. (Hey, with two children entering precocious years, I might need more than two additional lines.) Low rates, too — $30/year for unlimited calling to regular phones on Skype (eg, $2.50/month) and just 1.9 cents per minute at Gizmo with no minimum monthly.
Could be a very easy way to enable each of us to be able to talk (and wander around the house!) at the same time.
Walt Mossberg, writing for the Wall Street Journal, hit the nail on the head:
[T]he iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. [Emphasis added.] Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well ….
Maybe it’s beginning to sink in that there’s now a category of devices fitting in-between PDA’s and notebooks. They’re computers, and they’re something else. (Not every-thing else.) Apple’s iPhone and the Nokia Internet Tablet are just the first, best exemplars.
The iPhone doesn’t have a hard drive or a keyboard. It commits huge resources to its gorgeous screen and flexible OS. It’s driven largely by realization that we all want a walkaround web.
Same for the Nokia Internet Tablet.
No, they’re not competitors (except for people’s discretionary income). What I see, though, is that — different as they are — each conceptualizes the same insight. That’s why I wrote, back in January, that the iPhone validates the Internet Tablet.
From day one of the Internet Tablet era*, I’ve been a believer in the WiFi path. As broadband has increased its penetration wildly over the last few years, this has seemed reasonable. And I attribute the failure of the many Linux tablet predecessors of the Nokia 770 in great part to having preceded the era of easy-to-use, cheap wireless routers and widely available broadband.
We’ve entered that era, and if WiFi clouds aren’t covering all the cities as they should, well, that day is coming.
And yet.
And yet. “WiFi everywhere” is still an aspiration, not a description.
Last week, when I was comparing video-over-internet cam calls to high-priced “video share” cellphone calls, I had to jog myself to include information that you could in fact use your Nokia Internet Tablet from anywhere, not just within range of a wireless access point if you connected to the internet through a cellphone data plan.
This kind of thinking wasn’t native. NIT use = WiFi area is how I instinctively thought about it.
But Ari Jaaksi wrote about being really really untethered from the desktop way back in September 2005 when he described his daughter noodling away on his 770 on a car trip, connected to the internet via the Bluetooth phone in his pocket. And a couple months after that, I got to experience “internet everywhere” firsthand when Nokia lent me a phone and I surfed on the train ride into New York City and then walking downtown to work.
“Internet everywhere” takes the Internet Tablet to a far higher level of usefulness. It really does.
Still I haven’t treated that as an option. U.S. cellphone data plans seem to be ridiculously priced, with all kinds of gotcha’s. Apparently if you level with the telecom rep as to what you intend to do with your NIT and the cellphone, you’re unambiguously determined to require an $80- or $100-a-month plan. I can’t justify that kind of money, or even half that.
That’s why, in the midst of all today’s hullabaloo about the iPhone, the datum that leaped out at me was that you’re paying only $20 for an unlimited data plan when you go the iPhone route.**
That’s the first reasonable price I’ve ever heard of.
When do the rest of us get $20 internet? Why can’t we get it now? Hey, AT&T, I’ll switch to you tomorrow if you give me the same deal!
__________
* That would be May 25, 2005. I exaggerate by a couple weeks — I wasn’t a convert till mid-June.
** Not transferrable, not usable by your laptop using the iPhone to connect to the internet, etc. Reviewer David Pogue says Treo owners at AT&T are paying about $40 for unlimited Internet.
AT&T announced today that it was beginning “Video Share” services in Atlanta, Dallas and San Antonio, with additional markets to come in July and eventually rolling out to 50 cities.
Video Share permits the owner of a 3G phone to transmit live video images to another owner of an AT&T 3G phone in one of the supported markets. The price is 35 cents a minute, with $5/mo (for 25 minutes) and $10/mo (for 60 minutes) plans. The Video Share feature is extra and not part of any AT&T data plan. Only one phone can transmit at a time, but the direction of the video stream can be switched during the call.
The size of the video looks to be something around 176 x 150 (or less) pixels*.
Within the 50 cities that will get Video Share, of course you’ll have to stay within the 3G coverage area.
Let’s compare that to the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, now and, well, let’s say July.
Right now you can have two-way visual calls — each side transmitting live — with any other N800 owner. The images are webcam quality, at 176 x 144 pixels. If the soon-to-arrive Skype voip package contains video as anticipated, cam calls can be made with any of the newer UMPCs — that is, someone who can walk around with the same untethered approach of the N800 or a cellphone — and with the millions of computer-based Skype users with webcams, PC, Mac and Linux. Um, you’ll need to be within range of a wifi network or else make the call on a cellphone data plan.
These cam calls are free.
OK, let’s recap.
AT&T: Pay $10 every month at a rate of $10 an hour, for one-way video, and only to other AT&T customers with 3G phones. Because it’s a cellphone, you can walk around while you talk or pan the camera. You’ll have to stay within the 3G coverage area.
N800 Internet Tablet: Free, unlimited, two-way calls, to anyone with webcam and voip. (You have to use Skype, but you don’t pay anything to use Skype for these calls.) You and any other webcammed-tablet user will be able to walk around while you talk or pan the cam. And you will need to be within range of your wireless network or with a cellphone connecting to the internet, using your data plan from your own preferred telecom.
Gee, maybe if the iPhone were being offered with this fabulous deal I’d spend more time thinking about AT&T’s offer. But, gosh, why would I want to pay, and pay, and pay for something I shouldn’t have to pay for? (The day I do that, Apple’s coolness factor will definitely have rubbed off onto AT&T. Not yet, baby, not yet.)
* As I understand it, the phones use a webcam-type second camera for this video and not the photo camera the phones might have.
On the one occasion when I got to meet Ari Jaaksi, he told me the goal of the Internet Tablet team was to make the internet experience as good or better on the NIT as on a PC.
We usually talk about the aspects where the Nokia N800 needs to improve.
But what about WiFi reception? The N800 with the most recent OS is way better at locating and connecting to WiFi than the four laptops I currently have or have had recent access to.
The new Dell Latitude D820 I’ve been given at work doesn’t even see our home network (based upstairs) from the dining room. And something going on with the Comcast broadband or our inexpensive Netgear wireless router will break the connection to the family computer downstairs that can’t be resurrected unless the router is reset. But the N800 (and the 770 I have too) connect just fine after such singularities (which take place probably three or four times a week).
Is the Nokia N800 the best device there is for locating and connecting to a wireless network?
I don’t have the experience to say. What can others report?
Ephraim Schwartz (whom I first wrote for 25 years ago) has a post at Reality Check, his Infoworld blog, about Opera’s work to replace Flash by incorporating native video capability in its browser.
I hope not only that this capability arrives soon, but that it migrates to our tablets soon after that.
For the second time in recent months, I changed trains at the Newark Broad Street station on my way to New York City and ended up sitting next to another Nokia N800 owner on the 15-minute ride into the city.
My unnamed seatmate said his Internet Tablet enabled him to read blogs and other websites on the train without having to carry a laptop. We were long separated before I wondered whether he was connecting live via his cellphone or reading pages he’d grabbed before his commute.
Nokia once lent me a cellphone and wireless account and I surfed on my train ride into the city and even while walking from the train station to work. That was simply great. Surfing while literally on the go — and not just parked at a Starbucks while “away from my usual access point” — felt tremendously liberating. Alas, the outrageous pricing of every telecom has kept me from further on-the-go use of my NIT.
When our broadband provider had a several-hour-long service interruption a couple weeks ago, I could hardly use my computer. Even when working on local documents there were things I needed to check on the internet. I couldn’t read the paper (washingtonpost.com), respond to my mail (that is, email), translate (online dictionary at sealang.net/khmer/, omegawiki) or ask questions of my colleagues (Vonage and voip was out too). The major work I was engaged in entailed collecting geographic information from various websites (CIA World Factbook, statoids.com, Wikipedia) and integrating it with our local content; I couldn’t make any headway on that.
In fact, without the internet, I was flailing around helplessly.
This morning, I was in fact able to work on my laptop on the train ride, converting various files I’d downloaded earlier. I only had to deal with 35 internet-less minutes. But work or regeneration time, laptop or internet tablet, I can see I’m getting closer to the point of needing that Bluetooth-cellphone connection for the commute.
We went strawberry picking today and then poked around the farmer’s market, looking at everything for sale. Here’s a link to a video I made using the webcam in my N800:
I recorded the video using Nokia’s Camera app, version 2.7. [1] I made 6 short videos and picked this one because it was made indoors and has some really difficult things to image. As you can see, the video is webcam-quality.
I had to convert it (using mediaconverter) before I could get the video to play on my PC or in Media Player, so this the quality differs slightly from what I saw when I played it from the Camera gallery. The sound playback is better in Media Player than in Camera. This isn’t from the conversion, because the pre-conversion sound is better on the PC too.
You should be able to just stream the video, without having to download it.
ITT readers sondjata, SeRi@lDiE and Brendan responded to my webcam post by pointing out that Camera 2.7, available at garage.maemo.org, already does record video to the memory cards, so one of my three “I want”s is already available. Thanks! Added later: The link here was inoperative for several days but is working again now.
Look, to start with, the term used for the killer app for the Nokia Internet Tablet is not going to be “video calling.”
“Video calling” is so last century.
What we’ll call it when we can see the person we’re messaging is anybody’s guess. Maybe “cam calls.” Or VidIP (video over IP). Or VM (visual messaging).
“Video calling” is what the telecoms will charge hundreds of dollars for. It’s not what NIT users will be doing.
With a large universe of Skype users, NITs make dandy phones. But you know what? I’ve got phones up the, um, wazoo.
I haven’t had a tremendous experience with Nokia’s very-beta internet calling, but what I’ve had makes me think that webcam plus VoIP is less like a phone call and more like IMing without typing.
When my kids tried out the N800 look-at-me calling, they didn’t act like it was a phone. They stayed connected for forty minutes or longer and treated the NITs like video walkie-talkies, roaming around the yard (and neighbors’ yards) and even playing “you can see what I’m looking at” hide-and-seek.
I tried but wasn’t able to connect when an N800 was temporarily at grandma’s. Connecting to her, I expect, would have been more like a phone call with faces.
But I think the IM generation will make this walkaround webcam into just a really practical — no texting charges! no keying! — form of visual messaging, with bursts of messaging interspersed with periods of being connected but not communicating.
Thoughtfix advised me this week that webcams are becoming standard issue in the second-generation UMPC tablets, which means Skype cam calling will work between the Windows and Linux tablet communities.
And you put mobility + visuals + internet-pricing together and you have a killer app for the, um, VM generation.
