As server side, probably yes. However, would be good opportunity for any third-party developers around Maemo. I personally find Ovi services side be a bit slow on development but that is only personal opinion.

No, I agree with you regarding Ovi... I'm just trying to be optimistic...

For me, it is about being able to do the basic professional tasks in an easy to learn and accessible way. If you have such a device, it will get used by media professionals. If this happens, the media itself will notice and talk about.
Until now, the devices were for the technical creativity by developers and powerusers. Now the time has come for the device to become a tool in itself, a professional tool. The device itself may therefore not be a hindrance anymore, but must be the enabler.
To precise the answer, I prefer UseCases to poetry, though :-) Therefore, the following list shows my expectations and ideas for Creative Media Editing & Sharing on my device. The scope varies between abstract usecases giving a general idea and technical details that might be first steps in the desired direction.

Pictures: (Looks like the N900 is on a good way)

• Take pictures
• Crop, rotate, resize them. Remove red eyes.
• Transfer/Upload using various service
• Be able to work with pictures from external devices, either by accessing the storage medium or by transfer over USB (needs USB OTG or USB Picture Transfer Protocol).
• Print pictures on the go with various printers (using PictBridge?)
• Gphoto2 for Maemo5?
• Allow automatic workflows (auto-tag and upload directly after capture)

Audio:

• Record audio in mono and stereo in acceptable quality (as a dictaphone or for streetinterviews for radio broadcast) using inbuilt microphone or external mic.
• Support various standard compressions/codecs.
• Allow minor editing of recordings (Cut/Delete, Merge, Volume adjustments)
• Transfer/Upload using various service
• Allow audio streaming (dyndns? bandwidth/proxy?))

Music:

• My weak point - I'm accoustic guitar and voice :-)
• However, I guess that a) nobody wants to replace instruments and b) input/control is too limited on such a device to create electronic music (multitouch, space for two hands, pressure sensitivity). Skip that.
• Perhaps as a recording device for raw sound (MIDI over USB) or as a simple multi-track recorder to catch a jam session.

Video:

• Take video in at least SD (480i, 576i). Enable digital zoom while recording.
• Store using a standardized "modern" codec and container (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC), so that playability is guaranteed and transcoding unnecessary.
• Allow USB OTG/Host/Mass Storage (Include appropriate adapters/cables in package...)
• Allow minor editing of recordings (Cut/Delete, Merge, Volume adjustments, add 2nd audio track)
• Allow transcoding to low bandwidth formats?
• Transfer/Upload using various service? (Bandwidth)
• Allow video streaming (dyndns? bandwidth/proxy?)

From the various N900 reviews, specs and videos that I've seen so far, I guess that in many areas, we are "nearly there". Or at least we can really concentrate on the software, as it looks like the hardware is not the limit anymore - no excuses for missing software... (except perhaps the current state of development tools and environments for Maemo...but that is another story which I hope Jaffa will tackle at the summit :-)

I also agree with the position of allnameswereout in terms of the limits simply due to screen estate and UI possibilities - there is no need for full-power editing madness effects etc. However, the base elements of the initial workflows should and can be covered.

I guess that with this thread, we are in the" Instant and fun media editing/remixing/sharing" topic as originally announced - however, don't forget two other "media types": text and drawings (think xournal).

• What about scribbling a handwritten something over a picture just taken before uploading it? (my printer, an Epson PX800FW, has such a function using the scanner to overlay a handwritten note over a photo to be printed)
• What about a sketching app with a finger-scrollable canvas and a very simple UI? (my kids LOVE to scribble on their N800 and my N810 using Sketch - the canvas is however too small and doesn't scale to fullscreen)
• What about simple layouting/DTP? A scrollable canvas in A4/Letter/10x15cm, a method to write and position some textboxes, a function to overlay a few images or video stills. Then save it in PDF or print it.

In finishing, I return to the abstracter philosophy... always bear in mind the "limits" of creativity - I'm highly skeptical about the amount of / energy for creativity in the general population. Letss perhaps rather talk about cre-activity, a term I like to use as a placeholder for "being entertained while still being able to add minor input / low input activities". So, for our ideas of usecases - let's keep it simple, but complete and usable. This is what made the iPhone a success. With all our fascination for hardware and software engineering , don't forget the human end users!

For a simple example. check out the Philips Flat TV Slideshow Format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-885h9-1" ?>
<philips-slideshow version="1.0" >
<title>Title of the slideshow</title>
<audio>audio_url</audio>
<slide-duration>30</slide-duration>
<slides>

<slide>slide_1_url</slide>
<slide>slide_2_url</slide>
<slide>slide_3_url</slide>
<slide>slide_4_url</slide>
<slide>slide_5_url</slide>
<slide>slide_6_url</slide>
...
<slide>slide_N-1_url</slide>
<slide>slide_N_url</slide>

</slides>
</philips-slideshow>

Photo workflow example need by user Mikey Dread

How cool would it be to apply our tablets to media problems that are embarrassingly parallelizable? For instance, suppose a dozen of us took a picture of an event, with each picture overlaping one or more of the others. We could make a panoramic picture from the collection. Each tablet would help with the stitching. If we were clever with our exposure settings, we could make an HDR panorama.

Now let's extend that to the audio arena. A bunch of us could go to a They Might Be Giants concert (or put your favorite taper-friendly band here) and make a mono recording of the show. Afterward, we can mix them together into multi-channel audio.

Peer to Peer sensory archival Love it!

"Sharing," for all intents and purposes, doesn't just mean how we share information and media with others, but how we retrieve information and media from others. The demo at the above link is definitely a cool concept (and I got to see some of it at Nokia World), and it really brings the idea of "sharing" closer to home.

Sharing, though, should not be confined to any specific services or technology within a device, or an online venue. Unfortunately, everyone who is out trying to make a buck wishes this could be the case. Thankfully, with technologies such as RSS, sharing was able to break the shackles of a closed infrastructure to some extent. Now, we are able to create applications that pull information from various sources and aggregate it all into a single, pretty UI. And, in turn, we are able to publish our lives in the same manner.

But, not everyone has this kind of access (or the know-how). Because of this, we are forced to use services such as Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc. There is a positive effect of using services, though: everyone publishes their information and media in exactly the same way (which in turn usually gets turned into an RSS feed of some sort). Back when we were just discovering the benefits of feed aggregation, the sources came in a variety of flavors and formats that we had to decipher and then parse. Thanks to additional services like Technorati and FeedBurner, some of those tasks became easier, but look... We began resorting to 3rd-party services!

So, what if there was a way to share ourselves and to accept that which is shared with us in a manner that was seamless and natural? (Go watch that video again.)

Additionally, what if we were given a "blank slate," of sorts, that was tied to the Contacts app within Maemo? In this way, each slot that we allocated for each person whom we know would somehow allow us to add the "feeds" and API services of our choice. And, what if our contacts were able to send us feed invitations, in which clicking "Accept" would add the feed to their place within our Contacts. This could be a blog feed, a video or a song to stream, a list of files to download, etc. (And, while this would work much better over broadband, the initial invitations could be sent via email, Bluetooth, SMS, or whatever additional methods were available.)

Sure, we could still use all of the existing sharing services that we are all so used to, but instead of being accessible via additional applications or the web, they would all just be fed into our Contacts' slots on our device.

Tim

What's frustrating for me is that one big promise of bluetooth has failed to manifest: instant sharing based on proximity. So where are those coupons my device would collect during my wanderings?

I'm not naive-- I know it all comes down to trust. So where is the ecosystem of trust? Where is the universal permission standard? Why can't I set certain trusts, and when I'm in a domain supporting those trusts, enjoy what the proprietor chooses to share?

I realize this is bigger than any of us can solve, but surely entities like Nokia have the clout and capability...

Tim,

this is good explanation of what I also thought about for large part of past 10 years or so -- while working on Midgard together with Bergie and now, that I'm trying to get some spirit into Sharing on Maemo being, among other things, an architect for that subsystem (mostly in Harmattan, as I came to Fremantle well after it has been shaped in this area).

In Maemo 5 our Contacts are flexible to include any additional field you see as needed. Other applications could then access those fields and relate them. Mauku, for example, provides a good abstraction over regularly updated streams of information where emphasis is placed on small informational chunks. It could have a backend that uses Contacts to combine data sources you have described. I hope we could enhance it as community. Bits are in place to enable such enhancements.