Hyundai Telematic Korea have announced their way-posh Roadbank HTMS 18800 DMB navigator, an ultra slim, in-car navigation system with a hefty 7 inch touch screen.
Although only available in Korea (bah!), this little puppy should hopefully be paving the way for a new generation of multimedia navigation gadgets that will eventually get into the hot little paws of us technology starved Euro-types.
Back to the HTMS 18800, the unit comes with an electronic map which offers a realistic view of the roads and buildings as you cruise by, with an embedded Sirf III GPS module offering top notch GPS reception rate.
As well as offering navigation tools, the Roadbank comes stuffed with multimedia widgets, doubling up as a high end media console with support for movie playback formats like WMV9, MPEG-1/2/4, DivX, Xvi and H.264. It can also display digital photos too.
There’s a music player in there as well offering MP3 support, and if all that wasn’t enough, the thing can play live TV using T-DMB.
The Roadbank HTMS 18800 DMB runs on Windows CE 5.0 and comes with 64 MB of Nand Flash with a SD card slot providing memory expansion options.
As we said, it’s a Korea-only release, so we’ll have make do with an iPod, a compass and some Ordnance Survey maps in the meantime. Aving.net
Yet more proof that Koreans are spoilt rotten when it comes to having the very latest must-have mobile gadgets comes in the form of Samsung’s brand new phone – displayed, as ever, by scantily clad models.
The chunky black clamshell phone also lets users switch between having a small Picture in Picture (PiP) display showing the secondary channel or splitting the display in half, with the two selected channels sharing the total viewing area.
Naturally, users can also elect to fill the screen with just the one channel for fuddy-duddy, old-school types who are satisfied with just one channel playing simultaneously.
No relation to the fabulous football team known as the Bluebirds, the Korean electronics company Blue Bird have announced their shiny new BM-300 T-DMB Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
Although the 2.8 inch touchscreen TFT-LCD (QVGA) display looks like a bit of a whopper, it can only support a miserly 240 x 320 pixel resolution -a bit of a disappointment for a PDA and hardly likely to enhance the TV watching experience,
Memory can be further expanded via an SD SDIO card slot.
More flexible than a Russian athlete in a vat of oil, Samsung’s double-flipping DMB phone offers a novel twist on the clamshell format.
As well as the DMB functionality, the Samsung SPH-B1300 serves up the usual advanced mobile feature set, complete with a two megapixel digital camera and built-in MP3 player.
We can expect more details about the Samsung SPH-B1300 to be revealed at the CeBit 2006 show in Hannover next month.
Two recent studies into mobile TV on 3G mobile phones have managed to produce rather inconclusive results concerning the willingness of the great British public to use the service and how much they’d be prepared to pay for it.
The feedback seemed back-slappingly reassuring, with 83 per cent of the triallists “satisfied” with the service, and 76 per cent indicating they’d be keen to take up the service within 12 months.
“This trial is further illustration that we are moving from a verbal only to a verbal and visual world in mobile communications,” said David Williams, O2’s technology chief.
In a feast of digital convergence, Pantech & Curitel have announced the launch of their new multimedia-tastic PT-S160 phone.
The PT-S160 doubles up as a PMP (Portable Multimedia Player) and a satellite DMB receiver, with a sliding design only showing keys for DMB functions when closed.
The screen can be switched between landscape and portrait formats.
The makers claim a talk time of 300 minutes and a hefty standby time of 300 hours (although we’ve no idea how long you’ll get when watching TV).
We saw it with the Internet in the late 90s and iTV in the early noughties, now mobile TV is the disruptive technology du jour.
It’s easy to be swept up in the hype, and persuasive arguments abound.
Claire Tavernier from Fremantlemedia (right), owner of Neighbours and Baywatch, said “Fremantle TV” would launch on US mobile networks before the end of the year.
But is the industry is in danger of death by over-sell before it’s even arrived?
This is all sounding very familiar – we’ve been here before. As with the early days of the Internet and iTV, business models are unclear. Hurdles include lack of appropriate content – including rights clearance on existing properties, lack of spectrum and unproven consumer demand.
Tavernier also talked about rights, revealing that although Fremantlemedia owned worldwide TV rights to Mr Bean and The Benny Hill Show, both Rowan Atkinson and Benny Hill’s widow had said no to mobile distribution.
The most telling figures came in the final session of the conference: “Viewers don’t see their mobile as an entertainment device” said Enpocket’s Jeremy Wright (right). “They see it first and foremost as a communicator.”