The Phones Show 75 is now live, with something of a personal essay on device convergence, demonstrated on the Nokia N82 (though a few other devices could have filled the same role as well). Plus a hands-on review of Noka E71 rival, the Blackberry Bold 9000.
Read on in the full article.
Great show, I haven't seen one of these before.
I'd have to disagree with you somewhat on the things you say a smartphone (or specifically the N82) is not yet good enough for. For games, a N82 or N-Gage device sits between a Playstation 1 and 2 in capabilities. Both of these were mass selling games consoles. With TV out, an N82 is easily a viable alternative.
Try S60 Quake 2 on an N82 fullscreen on a TV (with rotated N82). It's really good, texture mapped and lit, and uses the graphics chip.
Video playback - Again, good enough to match dedicated devices. I tried using CorePlayer (1.2.0, so not even the latest version) with a *full size*, full frame rate TV show in DivX format (i.e. not converted for mobile in any way). I played it off a Sandisk Ultra 2 MicroSD card in my N82 (I think card speed would make some difference to be honest). Switching the video quality from High to Medium and using TV out with a rotated handset, I enjoyed full frame rate, full TV res viewing, and could not tell the difference with a DVD (seriously) apart from slight blurring when the camera lingered on a subject for a few seconds (this is the fault of the codec, and not fundamentally the setup or playback device).
Web browsing and laptop replacement (with TV out) - these are perfectly viable now with TV out but not ideal. To be ideal Nokia simply need to up the output res to 640 X 480 from 320 X 240, and allow bluetooth mouse support in Symbian. Then it would be fully viable.
Cheers
Alex
phonething.com
With the release of the Samsung i8910, a S60 5th ed. phone capable of shooting HD video, are we going to finally have widescreen versions of The Phones Show later this year? Ideally, as two separate feeds, 360p (for S60 5th ed. devices like the 5800XM and the N97) and 720p (for YouTube HD)?