AfterDawn: News

Japanese NEC demonstrated today world's first 3G (acronym meaning third generation hi-speed mobile phone networks and equipment) mobile phone that comes bundled with a digital TV tuner.

The exact specs for the phone are still slightly vague, but it comes with a quite small resolution screen with 120x160 pixels. The demonstration streams were delivered using MPEG-2 TS (a sort of a wrapper/container format, used in digital TV broadcasting) as a container, including MPEG-4 video at 160kbps bitrate and MPEG-2 AAC audio at 48kbps, mono.



Japanese terrestrial digital TV system has one of the 13 frequency segments reserved purely for mobile reception, so the low bitrate MPEG-4 will be sent out using that channel while the "actual" digital TV aimed for digital TVs and set-top boxes, will be sent out at much higher bitrates (and as far as we know, the video will be in MPEG-2 format rather than MPEG-4).

Demonstration phone's major problem at the moment is with its high power consumption -- the battery lasts only for appx. 1h of TV watching. NEC aims to improve this before the phone will hit the store shelves.

Source: EE Times

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 11 Jul 2003 14:53