The power of demonstration
Part of the challenge of making presentations about mobile content is deciding how to best show what is on my phone.
The phone projector technology seems to be still quite rudimentary. I’ve only seen one system that works well and it is a small plastic unit that slips over the phone screen, thus capturing the screen image while still allowing for keypad access.
At the Australian, Film Television and Radio School, where I do many of my seminars, I recommended the project-a-phone and although it does the job it is not very elegant and because the capture camera sits a few inches away from the mobile there tends to be glare on the screen that lowers the clarity of the final image that is projected.
In the absense of a good live projection system I have opted for taking screen shots from my phone. I have found a great application to do this with - Screen Shooter (v1.0).
The software can be downloaded by the web and installed from your Mac/PC to your phone. There is a 14 day trial period.
This is brilliant tool for showing the mobile interface. I did a presentation for ABC New Media people last week (download it from here if you like).
I have created a Flickr page with the images, so others can see examples of mobile content interfaces.
It seems that the best system for live presentations should come directly from the phone to the projector - ideally this would be via blue tooth or wireless. I know that Samsung has a phone that does this, however, I have heard that it does not do it very well.
If anyone can suggest a good projection system please share it with us. There needs to be a better way to show the mobile personal experience to a large audience.
September 12th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Not exactly what you are looking for but Remote S60 will get you some of the way.
http://mobileways.de/M/1/3/0/
Project live via USB/Bluetooth to your laptop and project the laptop.
September 12th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
You could try a phone with TV-out such as the Nokia N93.
September 13th, 2006 at 2:44 am
I’ve done this many times, many ways, and the best way I’ve found is to project your app running in an emulator directly from your laptop. You first need to hold a phone up to your audience and let them know they can see the demo running on a real phone - thus suspending any disbelief or smoke-and-mirror suspicion. Invite folks to talk to you after the presentation and play with the phone themselves - or pass the phone around the audience while you present.
I’ve tried it all and this is the best approach I’ve found so far. Most emulators have a nice feature which lets you enlarge them on the screen (think zoom) to be easily seen. This helps alot with projection demos. The flow of your presentation is better too because otherwise you have to typically switch inputs to a camera or what not to shoot your device. Audio is yet another reason to keep it on your laptop.
September 17th, 2006 at 11:56 pm
[…] A lovely review of the Nokia N91 at mobile trends (Nokia N91 kills the iPod) - the one I was waiting to check out … (he also mentions mac and nokia syncing). The blog mobile media show - talks about ‘power of demonstration‘ presenting demos on the mobile. “In the absense of a good live projection system I have opted for taking screen shots from my phone. I have found a great application to do this with - Screen Shooter (v1.0).” […]
September 19th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
I’ve seen nice demos at the Nokia HQ in Espoo, where they hooked up their phones to a TV screen using Wifi..
Then again, this will only work with a small group of newer devices (e.g. E61), but it looked nice :-).