Me and my N95 do Greece: Entertainment
The TV-out capability is one of the features of the Nokia N95 that I find the most useful. Incidentally, it is also a big crowd pleaser - if I suggest to show people a video or image I have on the phone, they usually first ask me how I am going to do it and when I tell I will just hook up the phone with the TV, they respond with something like "You can really do this?". Great stuff!
I recently took a vacation in Greece with my family and here I discovered another really cool way to use TV-out.
With us on the vacation to Greece we of course had our 18 months old daughter. My daughter - like most other toddlers - gets a bit antsy late in the afternoon. In Danish we refer to this time of day as the »wolf hour« - the kids have had a full day and are likely to be both tired and hungry, and as a parent, it can be stressful too. You have to cook dinner while attending to the kids - finding some way to keep them occupied until dinner is ready.
In anticipation of this, I had added a couple of »Postman Pat« episodes to my N95, thinking that maybe I would be so lucky to find a TV-set in our room (I was - but unfortunately the AV channel on the TV-set in our room did not work properly and I had to sneak into another room and switch the TV-sets to make it work. Not so much the Greek as the geek lifestyle!).
Anyways, I made it work and it was quite a success. When the time came for us to either prepare dinner or get ready to go out for dinner, we could take turns to sit with our daughter, watching »Postman Pat« or reading books. So, even though we went to and fro, someone would be with her at all time. Altogether, this made the »wolf hour« much more pleasant and tranquil for both us and our daughter.
Actually, I used the »Postman Pat« clips even before we got to Greece. When flying out the airline had us waiting for 45 minutes in our seats. Phew!, 45 minutes is a long time if you are 18 months old and you are not allowed (or able!) to move around. To make time pass, I took out the N95, put »Postman Pat« on and simply held the phone in front of us.
My setup for video on the N95 consists of converting various video formats to DivX (.avi) with SUPER - for instance videos downloaded from YouTube or such. I then use the free DivXPlayer to play back the videos on the phone and the TV-out capability to use a regular TV-set as an external display.
In this way, I can for instance put the following »Postman Pat« episode on my phone:
Another way to use the N95 - and its TV-out capability - for entertainment is to play games:
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