PhoneTalk

(Imagine this in a Vin Scully tone) Hello everybody and thanks for reading my blog. It is my aim in the coming months to ply you with the latest news in, well, cool stuff you can do with your phone.

In what will be a recurring theme here at Phone Smarts, I’m talking about streaming content from your Home PC, DVR, Satellite or Cable Service to your cell phone. There are a number of emerging ways to do this, spanning the spectrum from the ultra geek to something that I could recommend to my mom without having to worry about receiving frequent troubleshooting calls. Slingbox’s SlingPlayer Mobile definitely fits down on the mom end, and they just announced that they are porting SlingPlayer Mobile over to Symbian’s S60 OS. This is huge. Previously, SlingPlayer Mobile was only available for the Windows Mobile family of products which limited it’s availability to about ~15% of the overall cell phone market. S60 is much, much bigger, occupying around ~67% of the worldwide market (smart phones. Both figures are from a Canalys Report summarized on All About Symbian.) SlingPlayer Mobile should be here in the US just after New Years, which will basically give us all several winter months to tinker with it until wedding season. And then you’ll never need to miss a game again.

Some great S60 phones: Nokia 6682, N80, N93 and E62. There are several more from manufacturers other than Nokia coming soon, more on those when I know that they’re coming to the US. Now the only thing holding back SlingPlayer Mobile is connectivity speeds, as you’ll need at least an EVDO speed connection (EVDO - think Fast DSL or Cable speed 400 - 800k speed) to get an optimal performance. And an S60 EVDO phone has yet to appear in the US. Sadly the aforementioned Nokia phones (in their US configurations) only have EDGE (about 80k speed), so the playback might be a bit jerky. But Cingular’s UMTS (think 384k DSL) network is relaunching this month with HSDPA (think Cable Internet Speed) already online in a few major markets, and coming online in many more soon. Once that happens you should see parity in performance. And the LG JoY is rumored to be coming to the US, and that will have S60 and EVDO Rev A. Either way and with a bit of coverage luck, you could watch the Super Bowl on a chairlift.

SlingCell: some folks call it a mobile phone, I call it a cell phone. (couldn't resist)

Tags: Phone Smarts Nokia Symbian Smart phones Video