I woke up early Saturday to play basketball and saw one of my buddies set up a pocket HD camcorder to get some video from the games. This reminded me that I can take videos on the spot and share with my friends (almost) live from my Nokia phone with Qik.

Convenience

If my buddy wants to share his video online he’ll have to transfer the video from cam to PC first, then PC to Youtube. With my phone, all I have to do is open the Qik app to stream live and it will announce to my Twitter and Facebook automatically if they want to watch. There’s even an option to copy the video over to Youtube automatically or manually with one-click.

I tested Qik today on the Nokia N97 with 3 videos and set it to the nHD quality (640×352 resolution). Check it out below.

Basketball in the AM

Rollerskating and dancing at Central Park

Hula hoops

Problems. Qik sounds very simple, right? Just shoot and it’ll be there for everyone to watch before you arrive home. No extra steps needed.

I noticed some problems though. If I’m not connected to wifi, the video will be very laggy to the people watching it live. It reminds me of watching a Youtube video with a 56K modem. Remember those days?

I was connected to AT&T’s 3G network and streaming with the 640×352 resolution takes about double the length of the stream to finish uploading the whole thing. However most of my friends will most likely discover the videos much later so they won’t even notice the delay.