Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia has begun shipping its latest N-series phone in its home country, with the handset reaching further afield later this month.
The flagship feature of the N77 is its integrated DVB-H receiver, allowing the handset to directly receive television transmissions over the airwaves, essentially cutting out the middle man - the service provider. It's got PVR-esque features too, allowing a 30 second replay of live TV - and it'll keep receiving the show in the process. Not quite MythTV or Windows MCE, but we are talking about a phone here.
There are a few snags, however. Firstly, DVB-H is designed for mobile devices because mobile devices can't receive and playback a full DVB-T (regular Freeview) channel. So you can't just take an N77 and tune it in to the same multiplexes as your set-top box. Well, you could, if those multiplexes had DVB-H channels within them (which the standards allow for). But, as you might have guessed, they don't. Part of the reason, is that for now, our frequency spectrum is pretty much full, and the muxes themselves are full - we can't do without QVC and Bid TV, apparently.
There's hope yet, though, because in 2008, the 594MHz band, currently owned by BAe systems, will be available for DVB-H in 2008. But then we have the problem of signal strength. DVB-T is a notorious arse for signal strength. That's thanks to analogue transmissions forcing Freeview to transmit at low power (again, our spectrum's just too full), and then analogue helps things along by interfering with it too. Will DVB-H face the same pre-analogue-turnoff woes as Freeview? Guess we'll have to wait and see.
Come the end of the month, the N77 will be shipping to Vietnam and India (we guess they already have DVB-H over there, maybe?), although there's no word on when it'll hit UK shores yet.
Other features of the N77 include Symbian S60 3rd Edition (the standard OS across current N-series phones) and all the features that come with it, like QuickOffice, a PDF reader, 3D snake (we assume) and so on. Looks-wise, Nokia hasn't exactly gone to town. They've taken the N73, which looks a lot like an N70, which looks a lot like a 6880, and made it look a little bit like something stylish that Motorolla or LG might have made...
A 2MP camera doesn't break any records, but the 2.4" screen is high res (for a phone) and there's stereo sound (if you hold it 15cm away from your head, directly in front of you). Will the N77 be the leader of the DVB-H revolution? The 3G providers offering TV services have probably found a way to stop it, or at least a way to make some money out of it.
HEXUS Links
N77 - N-series website.
