May 25, 2008

Mobile Phones Going HD As Early As 2009

According to Broadcom Corporation you could be watching high-definition television on your mobile phone as early as 2009. Broadcom, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments all have HD processor ready to go that can encode and decode 1280x720 pixel content at 30 frames per second. Renesas Technology Corporation in Japan is going all out, currently developing a processor that'll support full HD 1920x1080 content on your cell phone. Several problems remain to be solved though. Processing HDTV for a cell phone takes up a huge amount of power sucking the life right out of the phone's battery, plus HD picture quality is likely not even noticeable on a screen size typical of a mobile phone. Manufacturers say the way around this is to allow connectivity between mobile phones and HDTV's, leaving the processing up to the TV set and providing a screen size more suitable for HD content. That means the mobile phone is relegated to nothing more than a streaming device. The challenge here is that the current HDMI 1.3 standard will have to be about half the size to properly connect a mobile phone to an HDTV. Look for a solution to this problem next year, but as cool as mobile phone HDTV sounds we doubt it'll catch on anytime soon.

Via Tech-On