One of the reasons I upgraded to the N800 was the camera. I envisioned that I would have full video call capabilities with Skype users from my N800. Boy that sounds great doesn't it? Well, that didn't come true and I can only video call with other N800 users, which I don't have any friends that have N800's. I know the N800 has option to use the camera for snapshots and video, but frankly my cell phone is better geared for that. This leads to my questions.....what are people using the camera for? Are there any rumors about future Skype video Support?

I'd have a hard time believing there isn't some sort of effort going on to get decent use out of the webcam...

Is that an opinion from an "insider" or "outsider"?

I guess I still wonder why they didn't release the Skype client with video. It just seems too cool to pass up.

Still dabbling with the device myself, but I hope to eventually create an application that'll restore a super-resolution image from multiple low resolution images as the CCD on the N800 is pretty abysmal.

Surprisingly I stumbled across an article from Nokia that mentions this "Order Filters in Super-Resolution Image Reconstruction" bit of a shame they've not implemented anything like this on the N800.

I'm hoping the processor would be capable of reconstructing super-rez images in a few seconds. It'd make the camera more useful certainly.

I've already done work on image stitching techniques and the hope is to work on something that'd stitch together multiple shots to create full panoramas - mobile phones are limited by memory so they tend to restrict you to 3 consecutive shots, but the N800 certainly isn't!

It'd be nice to pan across a view with the N800 allowing it to automagically detect image edge correspondance and stitch and blend together.

I use the spring action on the thing to fling dead flies and other small debris off my desktop.

I'd use it for stealth homemade pr0n but the resolution is horrible.

I wouldn't count on Skype video on the N800 anytime soon. The N800's Skype client is derived from Skype's general Linux client (complete with many of the same bugs). The Linux client does not have video, and the N800 certainly won't get it until after they add it to the mainline Linux client. Which I'd put sometime between the appocalypse and hell freezing over, given Skype's past history with the Linux client.

I have no experience with N800<->N800 video capability (maybe someone else can comment on that) but with Skype at least the video might take more horsepower than the N800 can muster.

For example, my notebook computer will cause the audio to seriously break up if I try to use Skype video. I have a processor usage widget and it gets pegged at 100% with the video on. Audio only Skype the processor stays in the 25-30% range if I remember correctly. My more powerful desktop has no problem at all with Skype video.

I'm just happy that Skype works as well as it does on the N800. With the good audio quality I can live without video.

The 176x144 video resolution of the camera app is horrible. However, the hardware is capable of recording VGA quality video thanks to a hardware mpeg 4 encoder present in the processor. For myself, I would use this hardware encoder to track the motion of images and use the motion information to control scrolling. Thanks for not supporting it, Nokia.

I might even consider trying to write a driver myself if I had the processor user manual.