When ‘HD’ really means HD…
By Ben Robinson on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 12:31 PM PST In Content, Devices, HTC
I was reading a review on Phone Arena the other day for the HTC Touch HD – and it made a couple of very interesting points:
1) what does the ‘HD’ mean in HTC Touch HD
2) the video playback isn’t great, considering the huge (3.8”, 800×480 pixel) screen
As you may have read the other day in my previous post on Mobile HD, I made the point that the “HD” is possibly meaning ‘Higher Definition’, rather than some kind of ratified, official ‘HD for Mobile’
Right now, the standard (of sorts) of a lot of Mobile devices out there is ‘Portrait-QVGA’ (240×320) – many, many devices, from the low-tier to the high-tier, use this screen resolution, on (admittedly) a selection of different physically-sized screens.
But there is a growing trend of device that push out the horizontal (when in landscape format) measurement in pixels, extending either QVGA or VGA into some kind of pseudo-WQVGA or WVGA – and it’s in to this category that the Touch HD falls, with 800 x 480, instead of 640 x 480 pixels.
Now, HD is associated with something specifically in the Home AV space, and that is the playback of high-definition VIDEO. So it would be fair to assume that any device mentioning the term HD would be pretty hot at playing back video – and when that’s Mobile video, it means a LOT of formats!
Not so with the Touch HD – from what I read, the format support of the native Windows Media Player isn’t great, and the actual playback itself isn’t smooth. For the record, current leaders in the playback stakes on Mobile devices are both the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N96, and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iPhone 3G – both of which wipe the floor with any other device out there in the ‘Media Smartphone’ class.
And it really comes back to a question of what then HTC were trying to achieve with this device – if it doesn’t do (’HD’) video well, that means you are left to looking at pictures on a slightly bigger screen that normal. And I have to say, that really doesn’t do it for me on a premium device…
You can read the original Phone Arena review here.
That´s a minor lack-of-appropriate-software issue, I´ve heard. You need to install CorePlayer to handle all video formats and it should give you the real HD experience, quality-wise.