Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Android, Symbian, iOS or others

Hello,

It's amazing everything that's been happening since I last took some time to write. In a short span of time we went from a few devices supporting HD to a whole slew of operating systems, form factors and companies that have phones or devices that have connectivity and support HD video.

Not only that but things are accelerating.

There were a lot of new devices shown at CES that had HDMI out connection, then there are some bizarre new convergences. TVs with Google TV and other streaming services onboard. Tablets with HDMI out to connect to TVs and monitors and even the Moto Xoom and Moto Atrix that are a Pad and a note-pad-smartphone-something are creating some neat ways to not only consume video but also work. I wonder what's next.

The codec support on these devices is also making it feasible to even forget about those old days when you had to re-encode the video so it would play on your device. I can only say, amen to that.

Now if only Netflix will start using something that will work on my devices (other than Silverlight) then it would also be great.

The gap between the main OS for these convergence devices is closing, at least when it comes to Video support. Android, iOS, Symbian and even Microsoft Phone 7 are having good enough support that transcoding is becoming a thing of the past. HD video is present on many of the top end devices and audio support is also very good. Now it will be something else that I'll need to think of before I decide which device to use.

One thing that doesn't seem to go away and it seems that each year there's a product announced but I haven't seen them in the wild is the micro projector phone. I don't see the point of using your phone as a projector. Maybe I'm not the only one that doesn't get it because these devices have been around for a few years now and are not catching on. Or are there any readers out there really waiting eagerly for them?

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