CEBIT – Nokia N92 — Video on your phone

At CeBIT, visitors got a first impression of how Nokia’s new N92 mobile cellular phone will show digital TV.

The cell phone was introduced last November but, due to a lack of programs, no one could see how it worked with video content–until now. Here in Hanover, several TV stations broadcast in DVB-H, the standard for digital TV on mobile devices (H stands for Handheld).

The display (whose resolution is 320 by 240) shows a crisp picture, but you could not see many details. So watching news or a music video clip will be more fun with a mobile phone TV than football, soccer, or other sports (so, exactly where is the ball?). Content will have to be fitted for the small 4:3 screen–widescreen movies will be no fun at all on the N92.

DVB-H will be supported in the U.S. by many prominent companies including Texas Instruments, Intel, and Motorola. These companies and several others formed the “Mobile DTV Alliance” earlier this year, which Microsoft recently joined.

The content will be provided by Modeo: However, the alliance is very young and it will take time until programming is regular. So, in my humble opinion, you have to be an enthusiastic early adopter to buy a phone whose main service isn’t set up on a broader basis.

By the way, the N92 is also a sophisticated mobile phone (WCDMA and GSM, triple band, can also be used in Europe) with an integrated 2MP digital camera. Its pricing starts at US$700.

Tags: Nokia

This entry was posted on March 16th, 2006 and is filed under Brands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.