Following from my post yesterday about the multiple Mobile TV standards, today I thought we might take a short tour de force of Mobile TV handsets – with specific reference to the DVB-H standard….
In my work, I am lucky enough to spend time researching DVB-H Mobile TV, and (critically) the devices that support it – as we know most people are quite attached to specific Mobile device manufacturers, so it’s interesting to see who from the ‘Big Five’ vendors appears in the list. Where possible I have added the networks these devices are sold in to:
- Brionvega N7100 (manufactured by ZTE) – at TIM Italy
- Gigabyte g600t
- LG U900 – at 3 Italia
- LG U950 – at Vodafone Italy
- LG U960 – at 3 Italia
- Nokia N92
- Nokia N77
- Sagem MyMobileTV
- Sagem My750c MyMobileTV
- Samsung P910 – at 3 Italia
- Samsung P920 – at TIM Italy
- Samsung P930 – at TIM Italy
- Samsung P940 – at Vodafone Italy
(Please note: this is not an exhaustive list)
What is interesting here is to see the prevalence of three companies – LG, Nokia, and Samsung. Both LG and Samsung are Korean, and as a result are not just capable with the DVB-H standard, but others such as T-DMB. In fact, LG just announced their own ‘standard’ for America! Nokia, on the other hand, is from our European contingent.
There is also another division between Nokia, and the LG/Samsung camp, and that is the ‘type’ of DVB-H that they are using – at which point you are probably thinking “so, there is splintering within even one standard?!” Answer: yep.
(By the way, there is a great page at Wikipedia that explains about DVB-H and it’s variants, in case you are interested)
Samsung and LG have both deployed in Italy ( probably one of the leading countries globally in terms of mature DVB-H services) – and launched with DVB-IPDC variant handsets, whereas Nokia favours DVB-H BCAST – ultimately IPDC will fold in to BCAST, but nonetheless, it does somewhat affect how the handsets function.
With IPDC, the handsets have to be deployed with CAS (conditional access system) in the DVB-H middleware, to enable the handset to decrypt the incoming signals. With BCAST SCP (smart card profile), the reliance on the device is removed somewhat, and the focus becomes not so much on decryption, but on content protection (using standardised DRM).
But what of the handsets themselves? Are they big, do they look nice, do they work well? I suppose that depends on the kind of requirements you have… all of the handsets above could be regarded as somewhat ‘chunky’, and several include a screen flip or swivel to switch from traditional mobile ‘portrait’ usage, to the ‘landscape’ we associate with television.
Some you can argue are more aesthetically pleasing than others, but of course all suffer from that age-old question of how you manage battery drain with a function that lights the screen up brightly, and turns on one of the radios in the device fully.
To see the handsets receiving TV, I suggest you try YouTube, where there are several videos showing these handsets in action.
In summary then, I hope you have found this brief tour of the DVB-H Mobile TV handsets interesting, and I am sure like me, you are looking forward to the next wave of devices that are coming with Mobile TV radios embedded in them. Will picked out one of the first, the Glofiish V900, here.
Next in this series of blogs looking at Mobile TV, we’ll take a look at which countries have services deployed, coming soon, and coming…. later!