Hollywood hot shot Gary Oldman is today releasing his new short film, shot on the Nokia N93 we’re told.
He’s taking the short label pretty literally, as the puppy is two minutes long, featuring what is described as “a round reflection in rippling water set to a haunting soundtrack.” Sounds lovely.
We’d imagine that this has cost Nokia a pretty penny, but it all goes towards burning into your brains that Nokia is about film. Creating it as we’ve seen here and watching it on their handsets too.
To that end, completely unprompted (we’re certain), Gazzer said, “Mobile video devices like the Nokia N93 allow us to capture the extraordinary moments in our ordinary days and share them with the world. The image in Donut is one such fleeting moment I happened upon that inspired me to grab my mobile video device out of my pocket and record it to share with others. I hope my film encourages people to do the same and I look forward to seeing the results on the Nokia Nseries Studio.”
Mr Oldman’s short will be premiering online on the neatly mentioned Nokia Nseries Studio, where from today (another coincidence?) anyone can upload short films to share with the world.
Happy Slapping
Camera phones have been used by some on the streets to make their own films, sadly many with violent overtones. Unfortunately the Hollywood violence that these youth had been subjected to for the whole of their lives (in the name of entertainment) wasn’t staged as it is in films, but real. Happy Slapping video’s stormed around school playgrounds about 18 months and featured members of the public getting assaulted, while those with the camera phones recording it laughed.
DVD quality or not?
Nokia appear to be back tracking a little on their definition of the quality of the onboard camera. When the N93 was first mooted, it was DVD-quality, it’s now being labelled DVD-like.
Nokia aren’t calling the N93 a phone with a camera on it, but a multimedia computer. You may mock, but this isn’t too far from the truth – it’s got a ton of processing power on board and a 3.2 megapixel lens with Carl Zeiss optics, DVD-like video capture and 3x optical zoom.
DV camcorders beware
Discussion of DVD-quality or DVD-like aside, the N93 shows the direction that camera-phones are taking, despite this early example being pretty bulky. The quality of these is approaching that of a standard DV (Digital Video) camera putting pressure on the DV manufacturers. The response to this from them is the introduction of HiDef camcorders. Expect this to become the standard.
The study of sales figures after the first month of Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare will not make pleasant reading for the current PC security software companies.
NPD’s figures showed that the losses for the previously dominant security companies – Symantec cried the biggest tears with a 10.1% loss; McAfee said bye bye to 3.3% and Trend Micro 1.3%.
Viacom have been making further moves to secure their future in digital media. Given all of the moves they’ve made this week, we thought it was worth summarising it.
Viacom are experts at delivering messages (TV, films and adverts to you and me) on television and films, and as we can see from the above deals, they’ve caught on that they really ought to be able to do this online too. To try and simplify this, they were looking for a way to smooth the transition of their content to the digital realm.
A visual communications company, All New Video, have announced a deal with BBC to enable feedback and input into TV programmes from viewers, video calling from 3G phones, Web cams and ISDN. On the voice side, it will add VoIP to its inbound voice channels.
The system give the assistant producer the ability to carry out a video chat with the viewer letting them ascertain their suitability of the show – frankly, filter out those not relevant. Each person can also be ranked and some notes made about them.
The new BBC system will let people do the same from the safety of their own bedrooms, where they’ll be able to leave their five minutes of video wisdom in a video mail system.
Nikon has announced their new ten megapixel D80 digital SLR, the company’s successor to the trailblazing D70/D70s cameras.
The D80 also offers a suite of in-camera retouching tools including shadow / highlight enhancement, red-eye reduction, trimming and monochrome and filter effects.
Nikon D80 specs Sensor 10.2 million effective pixels
Sony Ericsson has announced the latest addition to its popular ‘K’ series, with the ‘candybar’ shaped Sony K618 promising super fast video, music streaming and Web browsing.
The memory card can be upgraded up to a maximum of 1GB of storage.
For keen bloggers who like to update their personal diaries when you’re on the move, the K618 can send images direct to their own blog via Mobile Blogger.
Apple has announced the new G5 PowerMac, a quad Xeon, 64-bit desktop workstation stuffed with two new Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors running up to 3.0 GHz which are claimed to deliver “up to twice the performance of the Power Mac G5 Quad.”
Graphics are taken care of with a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with 256MB of video memory, with dual-display support.
Search engine giants Google have introduced a new feature which alerts punters about search results that could potentially lead them to dodgy sites with malicious code.
With search engine results routinely displaying links to sites stuffed full of spyware and adware, it is reckoned that US surfers arrive at on malicious sites about 285 million times per month – all from clicking on search results from the five major search engines.
We love it when people adapt 
Still, as an office timewaster it’s second to none, and well worth a go.
As of today BT is reshuffling its phone pricing structure. In a typical move of a power-crazed ex-monopoly, it’s giving with one hand and taking away with another.
The ‘taking’