Experience
As they say, sharing is caring, and our trial users do care. Armed with their trusty Nokia devices, our trial users recorded and shared life’s simplest moments with the growing community known as Nokia viNe. Check out their thoughts on the Nokia viNe application, and for all you know, you might find yourself as a new member of the Nokia viNe community!
What I liked
· Ability to auto-record location of where the picture is taken with a small little icon representing you.
· Ability to plot GPS information from one location to another.
· Can be used as a monitoring tool if required.
· Easy to use and not too complicated.
What I disliked
There seems to be a bug with keying in too long a sentence. The sentence just continues until it reaches the edge of the screen without breaking into another line, and I can’t see what I’m typing anymore. This is when I’m entering the viNe title while viNe recording is turned off.
I also suspect that the Nokia viNe app is a significant battery drain. This might be due to GPS always being on. The battery lasts less than a day even when I did not utilize the phone for Wi-Fi, calls or SMS.
It is also quite troublesome as you always have to manually record and stop your vine.
After uploading, who is going to visit the viNe website to see all these? It will be better to link it as a 3rd party link to Facebook, Friendster, etc. so that the moment we upload, it can be seen be everyone in our network. It would also be nice if we could upload to our blogs direct?
The map used in viNe requires downloading and is very, very slow. It always ends up showing the loading screen instead of the actual map.
Uploading of pictures in full size takes quite a while. Is might not be necessary to upload full-sized pictures, so maybe the system should convert it to a smaller size for faster upload. If someone takes more than 10 pictures at 5 megapixels, it could really take a while to upload.
Conclusion
Overall, I’m 50-50 on this – this can be used as a tracking tool for parents, girlfriends, and boyfriends. It’s basically like a live broadcast – people will always know where you are. Good? Bad? I’m not too sure.
Personally, I feel that this application is pretty decent but I believe most people who use this will actually be just teenagers or bloggers. It can also be used for tracking purposes. The recording of pictures with GPS coordinates are already used in most phones. A further survey of practicality should be conducted to see if it is really worth developing further. There may also be privacy issues and people might not even use the application.
It would be simpler to begin with the flaws I experienced, mainly because I do not want to taint, at the end of this review, what was actually a remarkable program for myself. One of the flaws I experienced was that the upload of the viNe to the Nokia website tended to hang, though it would recover after a restart of the program. Also, uploading videos did not work out for me, as several attempts at uploading the same viNe hung at 98% for 3 hours before I gave up.
Another gripe I had was that, for me at least, the program consumed so much battery life. I was unfortunately unable to viNe a spectacular concert I had the privilege of attending at the end of a long day. I also found the application slightly tedious to use as I had to open the application, turn it on (start recording) and turn it off (stop recording). If I had forgotten to do so, I would have either missed out a chance to viNe or viNed for too long. I also experienced instances where the journey was not recorded properly. The geo-trail for one of my journeys was not tracked, but my recorded media ended up stacking themselves into my end destination. These bugs inherent in initial programming, however, are to be expected. They might cause early adopters to feel bored with its flaws, when the novelty of the program wears off.
One major flaw I felt that the program had is that it is made for the elites. Only certain phones will be able to fully appreciate what the program has to offer, and these are the phones with better cameras, larger phone memory capacity, the ability to geo-track and have the latest technology to fully utilize the program’s functions. One last piece of objective feedback comes from something my sister told me. She said that the program borders on the narcissistic, because who might want to know everything about your journey but you?
However, notwithstanding the negative feedback I have given, the program won me over with the things it could and did accomplish. I, for one, object to my sister’s point of view. Looking online at the viNes of other users made me realise that my journeys sometimes overlap those of other people’s. It made me feel closer to a stranger somehow, as if we were sharing an invisible bond that linked us together. I knew his story, and he knew mine. In this way the online viNe community made me feel like I was part of a bigger network, that I may have touched other lives in my movements, even if I did not know it. In other ways, it was almost like living vicariously through a stranger, experiencing with him his moments in life.
In a less esoteric, philosophical viewpoint, it was very interesting personally to track my own journeys and be able to catalogue the best things about them. Memories that were tacked on to the experience of listening to a particular song with a special person, or reliving the sights I saw on a specific journey, or remembering what I ate where and with whom could be enjoyed again with visual cues to what I had experienced. It was refreshing to be able to record down all these aspects and being able to relive them again, especially the music cues at the different places I was at. Also, the online viNes allowed me to track down new places to dine, discover new music and see parts of Singapore that I never knew existed. These provide me with visual cues and incentives to visit and try out these experiences for myself.
What would have made this program even more enjoyable for me would be the inclusion of several aspects that would make the viNes more personal. Other than fixes for the bugs mentioned, there is the issue of tediousness in running the application (as I mentioned earlier, it was with constantly having to turn the application on and off). I would have liked a setting that allowed the viNe to start recording automatically with the start of a media application, such as the camera or the music player. An auto-off feature would have been very much appreciated as well, perhaps designed to turn off after a set amount of time (5 minutes perhaps?) of idle activity from all media applications.
I would have also loved the option to blog or at least caption (or even give separate tags to) each piece of media captured, at the same time that they were happening. It would have been more personal to see my thoughts on a song, or how good the food at a certain place tasted, or to warn people of the incidence of mosquitoes in the area. The idea of real-time blogging of random thoughts of the moment also appeals to me, as I may be having a philosophical conversation with myself on my way to/at my favourite place in Singapore that I would have liked to pen down but have no outlet to do so. A related point would be the inclusion of a mood indicator, to let people know that I am happy/sad/angry at any point of my journey.
Also, allowing the online community to comment on my viNes and vice versa would allow greater interaction and build the viNe page into a comprehensive community, and a huge social network whose collective experiences people could take advantage of. One last suggestion would be the ability to search for, track and add friends so that it would be simpler to find them and view their viNes. When the program kicks off, I can imagine the many geo-tracks made by many people and it would be difficult to find one specific track belonging to a friend.
Even with its flaws, the Nokia viNe program shines with its potential. Many reviewers on other sites have questioned the logic of such a program, but the opportunity of having real-time sharing (and hopefully blogging) ability is really quite appealing to people like myself who would like to extend our experiences to friends and family. With enough time to mature, I am very sure that the Nokia viNe application would appeal to and be adopted by many users around the globe as their main method of sharing their photos, musical tastes and their encounters with the world.
It is fascinating to learn what kind of music people are listening to in Singapore and to flaunt your journey ‘soundtrack’ virtually. This will be a long shot but it will be so awesome if you can preview the music. It’s the best way to discover new songs, new artistes or even a whole new genre.
Nokia viNe is very useful when it comes to geo-tagging your photos. You can reminisce where photos were taken (i.e. you will remember where you were exactly during when the photo was taken) and if you see photos uploaded by others of sights that captured your attention, you will know precisely where it was taken! A more practical use of this software is to take photos of interesting places, restaurants or simply a party venue and upload it for all to view and for easy navigation too.
I must say, the map itself is pretty exact as I deliberately checked out my location every 5 minutes while commuting. However, I would prefer the big dot to be a lot smaller so that it can pinpoint your location more accurately