Qik: Video streaming right from your mobile...

Ok, Ok, Ok... So maybe my last post was a bit over the top... Rookie mistake, may be... But you're gonna love what I have for you this time!

Qik... One of the best apps I have ever seen.

Have you ever wondered what you do with your phone's wi-fi/3G capabilities? Check mails, Twitter, poke friends on Facebook, that's it? Well Qik lets you use your network/data plans for much, much cooler stuff.

To put it simply, Qik is a Video Streaming software, you just start this App and you're live at http://qik.com/. After you are done streaming, the video is stored online in a Youtube like Video sharing stream, ready to be shared with the world and seen many times over. And the best part is, it's completely free.


How to install:

From your phone:
Method 1: If you have Ovi store installed on your phone, the application is available there. Quick and easy.

Method 2: Go to d.qik.com from your phone's browser. Select your phone model and download.

From your Computer:
Download Qik from here, unzip, transfer to your phone via Bluetooth, data cable, install.

You will need to create a free account with qik.com once, before you can start streaming your videos.

How to use:

1. Go to Applications>Qik
2. First time, Qik will ask you to login/register. Do the needful.
3. After you are successfully logged in, press "More" button on the screen to select exact settings you want for the video.
4. If you are happy to go with the default settings, just press the Stream button on the screen, and you're online...

Now, picture this. You are celebrating a friend's birthday party in your office cafeteria. You recorded the whole thing through Qik. And before everyone reaches back to their desks, you have it all online! You just add Video titles, and send out the link. People are astonished, stuff that happened 10 mins back is already online, to be viewed and reviewed and enjoyed...

Well, this is exactly what I did when we were celebrating my teammate Balaram's birthday. You can check out the videos at http://qik.com/thatguypulkit. Pretty cool, huh?

You can also map your account to YouTube, Twitter, facebook accounts and post your videos/video links directly, within seconds. What more? You can GeoTag your videos using your phone's GPS to let the viewers know where the video was shot, live chat on your video page, post comments on videos, and embed videos in webpages. Everything very, very Qikly.

Qik supports resolutions from 176x144 to 640x352. Select lower resolutions if on slower networks. And yeah, don't worry even if you go out of range. Just keep the app open and as soon as you are back in range... Qik will continue uploading your video. You can change your connection at any point of time while streaming your video.

If you have a slow connection, but don't really care about the data usage, you can use qik too. The only difference will be that the live streaming won't work fine, but video will be uploaded just fine(will just take longer).

Overall, a great App... A must have on your Phone... Hope you have as much fun using this as I did.

Contact management + Birthdays

The one thing that everyone worries about while switching phones, voluntarily or involuntarily, is contacts. Nobody wants to lose their phone directory that they have built up over time to go waste. How would you like if you phone book was always up-to-date with your friends' numbers, profile pics and e-mails? How would you like to have your phone book always backed up? How would you like to have all your friends' birthdays added automatically to your phone's calendar? If you would like any of that, read on.

My old phone allowed Long Names and multiple numbers for contacts, but when I tried to transfer those contacts to my sim card memory and then to my 5800, it spawned chaos.

It seems SIM cards allow only 10-12 characters in a contact's name and only one number per contact. There were a few contacts in my directory which had 3-6 numbers stored against them. When moved to SIM card, some contacts were simply appended with numbers ( like Pulkit Agr1, Pulkit Agr2) and all numbers for that contact was split between these contacts. I had no issues with that. But, for a few contacts, the numbers kind of overflowed and weird contacts with partial numbers as names and no numbers attached to them appeared in my phone book.

And this was when I discovered this app, "Mail for Exchange" and its functionality. Now I just wish I had this application earlier and switching phones wouldn't have been that tough.

I was introduced to this app by Prashant in his blog post on "Awesome birthday management". In his blog post, Prashant has explained how to have your Facebook/Orkut/etc etc contacts' birthday information synced to your Google Calendar. And then he comes to the relevant part here, Syncing your Google Calendar events to your mobile phone. Believe me, it sounds complicated, but is not that tough, and is really great thing to have. Please go through his post after you are done here to import your friends' birthday details to your phone. (I won't be reiterating the same stuff here.)

But, what I liked most about the app is that you can sync your phone book to your Gmail contacts list.

The advantages? Plenty!

• When you buy a new cell, you can have your complete phone book back within minutes/seconds.
• Your contacts will always be backed up.
• If a friend wants your contacts, you can share it very easily.
• And something I liked a lot, your contacts on your phone will have display pics same as Gmail/Gtalk. So when they call, you will not need to read a number/name to identify the caller, you probably will be looking at their face

Excited? Let's get down to doing it then!

First, you need to go to Google Sync and in "choose your phone" menu, select Nokia S60. (S60 5th edition is basically the platform on which Nokia 5800 apps work). Follow instructions on this website to install Mail for Exchange application.

Few Notes here:

• You can also install MfE from Ovi Store app (I got Ovi Store when I ran an app update on my phone)
• I used the following settings in my MfE configuration. (MfE>Options>Edit Profile)

Now, you can edit your contacts on your phone or in Gmail, they will always be synced.

Editing contacts in Gmail has lots of advantages. One, you can merge two contacts. What this means is, if you merge a phone contact with a GTalk contact, his profile pic, his e-mail id will be retained and synced to your phone. Two, if your phone contacts split like mine ( Pulkit Agr1, Pulkit Agr2), you can merge them together very easily. Three, usually people can work much faster on computers than on mobile phones, so you will have a great contact list soon.

Please note: Only the contacts in "My Contacts" group in your Gmail Contacts will be synced to your phone.

There is a disadvantage here as well. Your Gmail "My Contacts" group probably has lots of users that you don't know, but mailed to while they were CC'ed in a thread that you were part of. It takes some effort to go through your "My Contacts" group and remove those contacts that don't belong there. For a person like me who used the same Gmail account for publicity etc for college fests, this was a bigger task. But it is definitely a one time task.

Another disadvantage is that probably few of your friends don't exist in "My Contacts" group. I'll suggest, after you have synced your phone contacts with Gmail, go through your contact list and if you find any contact that has just a phone number defined, search for that contact by typing the name in search contacts box and merge these two contacts and make sure new contact is moved to "My Contacts".

Well, I think I have given a very comprehensive post here about contacts management. I'd like to end with a note of caution, please backup your contacts through Nokia PC Suite before trying this, you may actually end up losing your contacts.

Thanks for reading this post. And don't forget to post comments if you have any doubts or found it useful or discovered an issue.

Pilot Episode...

After being stuck with a lousy phone for three years, I finally decided to move on to a better phone when I started earning. I didn't really wanted to jump to a very expensive phone directly so I decided to find something in range of 9-11K INR. I considered various phones including Samsung Star, Star 3g (which were the cheapest touch phones in market, and definitely good value), Sony Cybershot (Really good photo quality), and a couple of mobiles from Asus too. But finally a friend introduced me too Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (thanks Arif!) and thats what I ended up buying. And beilieve me, I have loved every second of the last two weeks that I have had this phone and it is worth every penny that i paid for it. (BTW, it cost me 13.6K)

I have been experimenting a lot with my phone for the last two weeks and as a lot of my friends have this phone, I realized it would be good to share my findings with my friends. I have downloaded lots of great apps on my phone and I would share my experiences through this blog. Hope you guys have as much fun reading this blog as I have writing it.

I would like to mention here that I get a lot of help/apps from nokia5800.net. You might want to check it out too. Also, please note that most of the stuff mentioned here applies to all Nokia S60 5th edition phones and few of the previous edition phones too.

(Arif, Nanditha, Ujjwal, Mrinal, Gaurav, hope you guys find it useful, and please comment on posts to share your experiences as well.)

Regards,

Pulkit