Edition: U.S. / Global

Phones, Too, Get TV Time

Published: January 29, 2004

WHEN gadget lovers are young, it doesn't take much to give them dilated pupils and sweaty palms. You just whisper into their ears, "Batteries included." But as they grow older, it takes more and more to give them the same thrill. For a while, the term "remote-controlled" satisfies them, before they move on to such potent concepts as "flat panel," "six-megapixel" and "64-bit multiprocessor." But once they've tasted the honey of "wireless broadband," how will they top it?

Sprint has a couple of suggestions (if you're a gadget freak, please pull over to the side of the road): "cellphone TV" and "camcorder phones." Yes, it's true: video has now come to the very small screen.

Sprint's MobiTV service, for example, lets you tune in to any of 13 TV channels, right there on your cellphone. (The service requires one of Sprint's newish "Java-enabled" phones: the Sanyo 8100, VM4500, or RL2500; the Samsung VGA1000; and so on.)


Truth be told, MobiTV might have been better named MobiSlideShow; although the picture is colorful and sometimes sharp, the image changes only once every couple of seconds. (Contrast with regular TV, which flashes 30 images per second to create video.) The phone devotes the rest of its energy to supplying an uninterrupted soundtrack, with the understanding that your brain is much more tolerant of video interruptions than audio breaks.

Particularly in this era of high-definition TV, you might wonder how Sprint has the gall to call this television at all. One frame every two seconds? That's practically a PowerPoint presentation.

Yet incredibly, MobiTV works. Your brain is so used to watching regular TV that it fills in the visual blanks. The format, the sound, the lighting, the timing, those weird newscaster vocal inflections ("Firefighters at the scene have few details of the blaze") - it's all so familiar that the low frame rate isn't nearly as annoying as you would expect.

That's not to say that MobiTV doesn't have its annoyances. Once the "TV" comes on, it fills only a scrap of the screen, an area literally the size of a rectangular postage stamp. As a result, the various charts, subtitles, captions and bottom-of-the-screen "crawls" of news stations like MSNBC are illegible. (Oddly, sports broadcasts don't suffer as much. Yes, you're seeing mere snapshots of the game in progress, but it beats listening to the radio.)

An even greater irritation is the way the audio freezes every few minutes. You don't actually lose any words during the silence; instead, in mid-syllable, the soundtrack takes a sudden and disconcerting break. Meanwhile, you get this itchy feeling that you're falling farther and farther behind the live broadcast.

Surprisingly, watching TV doesn't diminish your phone's battery life nearly as much as you would expect. Playing nonstop, the Sanyo 8100 powers its TV for well over two hours before requiring a recharge. (Perhaps 2004 will be remembered as the year cellphones began requiring three battery-life ratings: talk time, standby time and TV time.)

Even so, the phone itself seems to fret about battery power. Every three minutes, it starts vibrating like a hovering stage mother, and a message appears, saying: "Are you still there?" Pressing any key returns you to the broadcast, but it's too bad there's no key called: "Well, duh! If I were done watching, don't you think I would have closed the phone?"

Finally, your viewing environment makes a big difference. In sunlight, the Sanyo's screen becomes a slab of solid black onyx. And on most of these phones, the speakerphone is too feeble to provide the audio in anything but a totally silent room. Otherwise, wearing an earpiece is the only way to listen.

These are, no doubt, first-generation technical glitches. Better networks and software upgrades are surely on the way. Now is the time, though, to contemplate the cultural implications of TV on your phone.

Consider, for example, how cellphone earbuds introduced a strange public phenomenon: otherwise well-dressed, clean-cut passersby, hands in pockets, apparently muttering or yelling to themselves as they walk by. Now, thanks to Sprint, a new public sight may soon become commonplace: people slumped in bus stations, airport lounges and meetings, staring motionless and slack-jawed at their cellphone screens for minutes on end, as though they're being chewed out by particularly long-winded spouses on the other end.

Then, of course, there's the little issue of driving. You could argue that Americans multitask in the car quite enough already. Will Sprint customers listen to news, sports or music on their cellphones in the car instead of turning on the radio - but glance down now and then for a glimpse of the video?

Still, when it comes to cultural change, the TV cellphone can't hold a candle to the impact of the camcorder cellphone, which Sprint now offers in the form of the Sanyo VM4500. With only two button presses, you can begin recording an actual movie with sound. Each video clip can be up to 15 seconds long; the phone can hold 10 of them at a time.

Of course, you may never reach that limit, because the real joy comes from sending them from the phone to the Web, to someone's e-mail box or to another cellphone. All of these options are listed on a single, simple menu, although video clips take some time to send - maybe 30 seconds - and a similar interval to receive on the other end.

When you send a video by e-mail, your recipient gets a text message that says, "You have received a video from: 9334888115

@messaging.sprintpcs.com" (the digits represent your phone number, of course). When you click Play Video, your browser opens a Web page containing the actual movie.

The result is not an Imax film by any means - in fact, its resolution is 96 by 128 pixels, and the audio and video sometimes drift out of sync. But the color is terrific, the motion is smooth, and the VM4500's speaker is loud enough to make the soundtrack audible even over life's dull ambient roar. (You can examine a sample video at www.nytimes.com

/circuits.) A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a video must be worth at least 50 pictures.

Sprint isn't the first company to offer video mail; T-Mobile's Nokia 3650, for example, creates 10-second clips with sound. The Nokia, though, is a larger computer-phone, not a sleek black flip phone like Sprint's.

Both Sprint and T-Mobile offer surprisingly reasonable flat fees. Sprint charges $15 a month (on top of your voice plan) for unlimited Internet access, TV, picture sending, and video sending. T-Mobile charges $5 per month for unlimited picture and video sending and offers an à la carte plan: 25 cents per video. (T-Mobile Internet access is a separate $5 fee.)

Like it or not, the age of cellcorders has arrived. Privacy policies will need updating, of course; the nation's locker rooms and Y.M.C.A.'s are only just now getting around to banning still picture phones.

In the big picture, though, videophones have almost infinite promise. Think of how useful instantaneous video clips could be in the business world ("Yo, Casey, is this how the capacitor is supposed to fit the sprocket?"), not to mention the personal world ("Sorry you had to travel on your birthday, honey, but the kids want to sing you a little something.''). As for shoplifters and 7-Eleven holdup artists, consider yourself put on notice: in the cellcorder era, all the world's a security camera.

These technologies aren't rock-solid yet; the TV is choppy, and the movies are minuscule. On these phones, "video quality" is practically an oxymoron.

But it's a cellphone, for heaven's sake - you're getting TV and capturing video on a cellphone. For the tech-obsessed of today, and the masses of tomorrow, that's quite a thrill already.

E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com