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Real-Time, Detailed Face Tracking On a Nokia N900
ptresadern writes "Researchers at the University of Manchester this week revealed a detailed face tracker that runs in real-time on the Nokia N900 mobile phone. Unlike existing mobile face trackers (video) that give an approximate position and scale of the face, Manchester's embedded Active Appearance Model accurately tracks a number of landmarks on and around the face such as the eyes, nose, mouth and jawline. The extra level of detail that this provides potentially indicates who the user is, where they are looking and how they are feeling. The face tracker was developed as part of a face- and voice-verification system for controlling access to mobile internet applications such as e-mail, social networking and on-line banking."
... low amount of apps, etc.
You can install Debian packages on an N900. It's essentially a tiny ARM tablet running Linux.
Ahem.
I had an iPhone before my N900, and frankly I adore the N900. It's fast, responsive, and it's easy to understand what's going on. If the music's skipping (which happened on both devices), I pull up top, then renice my music player. If I want a nice note-taking program, I just run emacs & org-mode on it. Then I'll 'git push' those notes for my other machines. I use citrix to run an app at work (note: despite what the website says, it doesn't actually require motif). The map program (not the stock one, but one you can download a package for) is utterly fantastic. I even have a subway map for my city.
Really, advanced users of the iPhone really just want a mobile computer, with a phone tacked on. The UI on the N900 is pretty good, and it does what I want with few problems, and many, many wonderful plusses over the iPhone platform.
Also, it has a keyboard, replaceable battery, and flash :-) I can stream full-screen flash videos in a cab.
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250,000 huh?
Most of the iPhone apps fall under the following categories:
-small flash-like games
-videos wrapped in an app api
-sound boards
If you are going to count apps like that, then lets add the following to the n900's list
-*actual* flash games (addictinggames.com, etc all work)
-built in unix tools (top, etc)
I'm fairly certain if you compared these now-equivalent lists, you would probably find the n900 has MANY more apps, and that most of them are probably MUCH better written to boot.
Oh, did I mention you can literally write your own apps in almost ANY language you want without paying $100 for a developers key. You can even distribute your own software repository publicly without paying a fee or asking users to void their warranties.
Yeah, 250 000 apps sounds kind of pathetic to me...
Course, Nokia is a phone company and that's how they market it.
The N900 is a Linux box, which fits in your pocket, and which can talk to GSM, UMTS, WiFi, Bluetooth, FM transmitter and receiver, infrared transmitter, GPS.. Has an accelerometer, touchscreen, 5MP camera, audio (obviously), and TV out.
Lets put it this way. The N900 is a general purpose mobile computing module with battery backup that can do everything, talk to everything, uses open standards and is easy to use.
You can write bog standard shell/python/java/c/ASM/whatever software for it and distribute them as Debian packages.
Anything you can think of to do with a computer, you can do with the blessing of Nokia and you can do it mobile with full knowledge of location and movement. That is the difference between open and closed.
No offense or anything, but it's a no brainer.
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