TV Phone Musings
Most of the “convergence” devices out there involve the telephone and the computer, but not the TV, or at least not the broadcast part of TV – more just the element of TV as a monitor for playing pre-recorded video. But Sanyo, anyway, looks like they may introduce a phone with an honest-to-goodness TV tuner, and a digital one at that. The fact that it’s digital means that it could theoretically display high-definition content, although for a screen the size of matchbook, I hardly think you would be able to tell the difference.
Live broadcasts are something that’s so far been somewhat missing in such devices. Sure you can go up online and look at news on a website, or you can even have SMS messages sent to you with news headlines and brief stories. But the immediacy of live TV or even Radio just hasn’t made it. Since we’ve had portable TV’s for at least a couple of decades and portable radios for a lot longer, it’s a bit surprising to me. I mean portable radios have gotten so miniscule that adding them to a phone would mean little if any additional real estate.
What’s really needed for all of these devices is a screen that will make viewing a pleasure rather than a chore of squinting. The screen would have to use technology we currently don’t see in consumer devices but which has been developed and probably will be coming out some time in the next 5 or 10 years. The technology is called "liquid polymers" and it allows displays that are thin, flexible, and cheap. Theoretically these screens could be folded or rolled so that you could carry them inside of a small device or phone that could fit in your pocket or belt, but when you wanted to watch something for a longer period (not just a quick check to see who’s calling, etc.), then you’d just open the compartment, and unfold the screen and all of a sudden you have a monitor-sized screen but with the dimensions and weight of a piece of paper. Pretty damn cool!