Qik

One thing you can do with your Nokia N95 that you can't do with the iPhone is to broadcast live video via Qik.  Pronounced "quick" and developed by Visivo Communications of Santa Clara and Moscow, this application does some clever buffering to do live streaming and then following up with more data to allow higher quality viewing of the stored stream.  The app is very simple to download, install, and run.  You just press the "stream" soft key and the video shows up on your Qik profile page or on any page where you embed the provided html, as you can see below.  You can also enable options to automatically notify your Twitter followers that you have started broadcasting and upload the resulting video to YouTube.

While you are broadcasting, viewers can type comments on the web page which are superimposed on the monitor window on the phone.  The most recent video is displayed on the Qik home page, so you are almost always guaranteed an audience.  For my admittedly banal video of my toaster I had 19 viewers, many of whom commented on the experience in real time.

I did two "toast" videos.  In the first I was connected via AT&T's HSDPA network, which doesn't work so well in my house.  After the first few seconds, Qik started buffering and the delay, which was displayed in large red letters, mounted to close to two minutes, which was how long I had been shooting.  I switched to my 802.11 network and the app seamlessly resumed uploading.  Unfortunately, the user messaging feature doesn't seem to work when connected via 802.11.  More on that later.

If it ever stops raining here I'll go out and shoot some more interesting videos.  In the meantime, check out the videos from Spring VON, Robert Scoble,  Steve Garfield, Robin Good or just click on the Browse button on the Qik home page.