3 posts tagged “nokia n95”
Setting up radio on the N95 was a nice experience, I was just expecting the bog standard manual tuning, but in fact after providing my location the mobile downloaded a list of station presets:
The radio does a pretty good job, lots of stations are still too full of static to hea
r properly but some come through almost crystal clear. I'm definately not used to that on a mobile!
The n95 also supports visual radio content such as that seen on some stations when listening to radio on freeview. This content could be anything from adverts to short film reviews to details of the currently playing song.
So I was a little surprised to find that the N95 8Gb has a barcode scanner application, so I decided to give it a go. After many failed attempts and some research I found that it seems to support only QR Barcodes, which is not something we really see over here in the UK. Still, I managed to succesfully create and scan my very own barcode with hidden message (This barcode was made at QRDemo.com but Nokia also provide an online app to do the same on their website. Thanks to Jason Bradbury's Blog for pointing me in the right directions):
Even if you don't have the N95, there are a number of apps available for mobile phones to allow bar-code scanning. The Nokia site lists some of them here.
So what use are they? Very little at the moment, certainly in the UK. Some tabloids, particularly The Sun, are starting to use them as a way to enable easy links to websites for advertising as URLs embedded in the barcode come up as clickable links when scanned on a mobile phone. However I think it'll be a while before it takes off with any ghusto as we aren't exactly on a mission to engage with advertising, more like avoid it. It'll also be quite a while before anough phones have this functionality to make it useful.
For the moment the best we can really do with them would be a kind of public game similar to geocaching, such as ConQwest that happened in 2004. If anyone thinks of making something like this in UK let me know!