Cell Phone TV
With the dawn of the wireless era and wireless technology, speed was always at the forefront of development. We have seen technologies like GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, and more to come. With this new speed over a cellular network, comes features and services that wireless carriers can use to suck more money from you. One of those services is streaming video that has been promised for years now. Problem though….
People in the United States are not like folks in Europe. People in Europe use cell phones for all sorts of things other then to make a call. Text messaging is huge in Europe, but the United States is still playing catch up. Wireless carriers in the US use advertising gimmicks to spark text messaging like that stupid voting option for American Idol. What they keep forgetting is that people still want to be able to place a call and have that call go through. They want fewer dropped calls. They want coverage all over the place. They are not looking for data features yet.
The geek in me loves what the wireless carriers are doing. I love seeing all this new stuff and all the data speeds. It means I can remain "plugged in" no matter where I go. I just don’t want to pay for it. So, I work for a wireless carrier and then I can enjoy this stuff for free. Once I am gone, I probably won’t use it. I want speed for use in surfing the internet. I want to tether my phone to a laptop or PDA so I can browse the internet where ever I might be.
Video sounds good on a cell phone, but I don’t think the handset technology is ready for it. As more features are packed into smaller devices, battery life gets shorter. Not to mention that screens can’t really support the resolution I would like to see. Most cell phone screen support 65K colors. Because the resolution needs to be reduced in order to stream the video, the end user tends to see more a pixilated image on the screen. Of course what you see on TV commercials sure looks crystal clear and sharp. They make the screens look like damn HDTV televisions. I am calling b.s. on it.
Anyway, check out an article at the Seattle Times about TV on your cell phone.
