Nokia Fever

Nokia Beta Labs updated their Photo Browser to v 0.09 (5) a couple of days ago and I decided to give it a shot on my 5800. I am very much impressed by the cool features it offers but some of them do need some fine tuning though. Being an application in the beta stage, I expect all these minor issues will be ironed out by the time the final version is released.

Installation

Photo Browser v 0.09 (5) for the s60 fifth edition devices can be downloaded for free from the official website of Nokia Beta Labs here. Its a 1.5 MB .sisx and hence not advisable to download over the air (unless you are on free wi-fi or unlimited data plan). Installation is a breeze and you can start browsing your gallery using the application in no time. Before proceeding to using this application, it is advisable that you go through this guided tour to get a glimpse of different features offered by Photo Browser:

Features

Photo Browser brings kinetic scrolling like navigation for exploring through the gallery. I personally like the moving wall type of scrolling. Its more like you are gliding through a floating carpet kind of scrolling through the photos. As can be seen from the video above, with just a couple of wipes you can scroll start to end of the gallery. Another cool feature is the magnifying glass with a long tap. As can be seen from the screenshot to the right, it zooms out just enough so that you don’t see grainy zoomed out picture. If you feel your 5800 screen is not letting you see some finer details of an image, you can always zoom out a section of the image with just a long tap. This is as easy as useful it is for photo browsing.

My experiences with face detection and navigation left me with a mixed bag of feelings. At times, it works great, detecting all the faces in an image but most of the times, it failed to detect all the faces. Like in the screenshot to the left, the application could detect only one face here and I found that if the faces occupy less than 20-30% of the image, face detection performance is abysmal. It works great with closeups though. This is one of the areas that needs fine-tuning. Like has been explained in the video above, users can browse through faces in a single image, if all the faces are detected by the application.

Pros

1. Kinetic Scrolling like navigation is great
2. Double tap zoom and long tap magnifying glass are very user friendly
3. Face detection and browsing is a great feature to have in a photo browser
4. Animated landscape to portrait mode rotation and vice-versa is cool

Cons

1. Still a bit laggy
2. Face detection needs to be fine tuned to detect more faces especially when the photos are not close ups
3. No options button for performing basic functions like send, set as wallpaper, delete etc

Verdict

Nokia Photo Browser is a cool application to have on your 5800. Especially with Nokia announcing that they will be concentrating on touch screen devices for this particular application, it can be expected to only get better with time. With the present feature set, its more than impressive, bringing some innovative features for a photo browser. I personally like the kinetic scrolling like browsing around the gallery along with magnifying glass. Only the other day I had pointed that Nokia should incorporate kinetic scrolling for the contacts screen after reviewing Gravity, and it turns out that Nokia has already done its home work in this regard. They have incorporated kinetic scrolling in their photo browser and it may end up on our contacts screen anytime from now. Kinetic scrolling does make life simpler and if you have a lot of photos, you gotta have the latest version of Photo Browser on your 5800.

Related posts:

1. <a href=”http://nokia5800.net/2009/04/01/nokia-5800-app-review-nokia-photo-browser/” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link: Nokia 5800 App Review: Nokia Photo Browser”>Nokia 5800 App Review: Nokia Photo Browser
2. <a href=”http://nokia5800.net/2009/06/16/nokia-5800-app-review-gravity-v1-175180/” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link: Nokia 5800 App Review: Gravity v1.17(5180)”>Nokia 5800 App Review: Gravity v1.17(5180)
3. <a href=”http://nokia5800.net/2009/05/10/nokia-5800-app-review-wavesecure/” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link: Nokia 5800 App review: Wavesecure (Updated)”>Nokia 5800 App review: Wavesecure (Updated)

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