Nokia Lifeblog now available

[Dazzla Veteran]

Nokia have released their first public beta of their Lifeblog suite for the 7610 and PC (other phones can be used):

http://nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig=/lifeblog

Here's the blurb:

Nokia Lifeblog is a PC and mobile phone software combination that effortlessly keeps a multimedia diary of the items you collect with your mobile phone. Lifeblog automatically organizes your photos, videos, text messages, and multimedia messages into a clear chronology you can easily browse, search, edit, and save. Nokia Lifeblog does the work of organizing the items you create and receive, and you can also add notes throughout the day, or tag and update your favorites so they're always on your phone.

First thing you're asked when opening Lifeblog on the phone is if you want to import existing media. I selected yes and this took approximately 6 minutes (around 90 photos and 10 movies ) with the progress bar saying "Creating new database links".

First of all it didn't actually import my photos, but after choosing "Options - Import - Recover lost items" it added my pictures and movies.

One thing I noticed is you can't adjust the volume of the video clips in the Lifeblog phone app, bit vital really. There not much information you can add to it, just a "Location" field :o

Item view:

Dateline View:

Upon installing the Lifeblog app on your PC you just register your phone and it asks you to connect via USB and BT (I chose BT) and it starts syncing with your lifeblog app on your phone:

I had 108 items to sync and I chose BT so it took around 17 minutes for a complete sync of data, every successive upload will be far, far less because it's just subsequent data. The sync actually failed around 12 minutes through with a lost connection, perhaps the phone thought it was idle or something. Anyway, they're all synced now. here's what's the main screen looks like (resized from 1600 x 1200):

Navigating along the timeline is very simple. There's 2 ways; you can either drag the lime gripper thats floating along the top with the date written on it, or if you look closely on the timeline where the gripper is there's different shades of blue, they indicate the different days. Hovering over them reveals the date and clicking them takes you directly to what happened that day.

You can rotate images and add text notes within the PC suite:

By default it shows Text messages, notes, pictures and movies but this is changeable in the bottom left:

In the bottom right you can jump to any date by clicking the Calendar button which will make a calendar appear:

Viewing individual content is a bit boring:

There should be a lot more information allowed to be added, as well as searchable metadata. That'd be a cool function because I image as the year rolls on finding that elusive photo will become more and more difficult! The search function works, and works pretty well I guess, it can search within filenames and "Location". The "Favorites" function is a bit pointless for me at the moment because I've only had the phone a week or so, so the section is a bit bare :D After a while I guess it could become pretty cool; you add media to the favorites section by just dragging it to the favorites "well" at the bottom of the application:

And that's about it for my little summary of Lifeblog! Actually seems pretty cool and adds a new fun dimension to the phone, keeping a cool little log of all your ups (and downs) throughout the time you have the phone. Maybe the novelty will wear off, maybe it wont but for now I'll just enjoy it :)

[Creamy]

WOW!!!

That sounds great!! :blink:

Will take a closer look at it right now!

Thanks for the Info...

Maybe my phone is supported, too... :huh:

[jingarelho]

i wish in the future suports other phones like 3650 and 6600 :)

[Dazzla Veteran]

It's not a bad little app, over the coming weeks and months it'll improve simply through increase of content from me. There's a few things that would be nice if they implemented it such as batch adding of attributes such as "Location". For example if you go out for a party and take a load of photos, it'd be nice to come back and sync then just batch add the attribute "Angelas Party" so when using the search feature it'll single out all those pics. It's a bit cumbersome in that respect but they have a feedback form :D