Friday, April 9, 2004
I Want My M(obile) TV!
Posted by Pat Logsdon in "NEWS" @ 12:00 PM
According to Dottocomu, Toshiba has put a TV tuner in a phone. "Vodafone Japan's latest handset, out in late April, is its second phone with a built-in TV tuner. The Toshiba-made V401T one-ups the previous model, NEC's V601N, by including an FM tuner as well as the TV, plus a 2.2-inch QVGA screen that should take some of the pain out of viewing at such reduced dimensions. It's possible to record stills and movies from TV broadcasts, though the lack of an external memory card limits you to 12 minutes at five frames per second using the 24MB of internal memory."
The TV tuner apparently sucks a lot of juice from the phones (they only last about an hour), but that's to be expected - cell phones don't have very large batteries. Could there be a mockup somewhere deep in the R&D bowels of Toshiba that integrates a TV tuner with an e-805 form factor, screen and battery? Combine the tuner with the already excellent ATI graphics chip in the unit, and you'd have a seriously killer device. What do you think? Would you like to see TV in a future Pocket PC, or would you rather rot your brain in a more productive way? :mrgreen:
