February 12, 2008
Eyes on video at mobile confab
Cell phone makers at the Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona advanced their quest to grab entertainment dollars as they introduced new handsets Monday geared for use as music, video, TV and gaming devices. [via The Hollywood Reporter]
-- With TV and video in mind, Samsung showed off its new F490, a video-centric phone with a 3-inch by 2-inch screen, which is larger than the average cell-phone screen. 17% of the people in South Korea watch mobile TV.
-- Nokia unveiled its video-oriented N96 with a large 2.8-inch screen size and enough storage capacity to hold "more video than most of us watch in a month.
... Although the mobile phone has started to catch on as a portable music player, it's sputtering as a TV device.
At the same time, fewer than 1% of mobile users in the five biggest Western European countries and the U.S. watched live TV or broadcast TV on their handsets, according to M:Metrics, which did not provide figures on video viewing."
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