Mobile Videophone

alecbrown writes: "Orange, a mobile phone service in the UK is about to release a Mobile Videophone coming out in 2001. As far as I know it uses Microsoft's PocketPC platform, and works on GSM1800, since as Orange has a HSCSD service and no GPRS service yet it is probably based on the former technology. I hate to think how expensive calls will be on that."

Comments

Building Upon Success...

[LHOOQtius_ov_Borg]

Is this building upon the resounding success of land-line and Internet videophones and hoping to lure all those people accustomed to this kind of communication over to the wireless world...?

When I worked at Lucent I worked in a Bell Labs group that did R&D into Internet video (among other things), and we also had a partnership with PictureTel. Not only was there little luck selling the PictureTels and Lucent innovations thereupon, but even less success in getting people to use them, even within Lucent. Why? The video sucked because bandwidth was still too slow and even the top-of-the-line video encoders gave us too-small pictures and bad resolution (even on a point-to-point connection; even over our ATM network... depending on which system)

Now, maybe wireless videophone systems are more apt to be used than land-based ones owing simply to the personalities of the "road warrior" type and how they communicate, but this product info doesn't mention whether or not they address serious issues regarding the usability of videophones...

Without eye-tracking for frame centering and other feedback, the image feels too unnatural, and people have a difficult time communicating with it because they get none of the visual cues they'd like to have in addition to speech - so rather than enhancing the comms it becomes distracting and (in some studies) upsetting and off-putting (especially when network or codec related jitters cause desynchronization of audio and video).

Currently, wireless networks are even slower than the best land-line networks, and small handheld devices still can pack-in less DSP and CPU power than big systems (in fact, that will always be true...) Their system does not mention anything about image resolution or bandwidth (and resultant FPS using their codec - and how this effects sound quality), and the total screen size is 4" including the person you're talking to and (oddly) feedback of yourself talking (something I don't particularly want to see when I'm talking to someone else)...

So it looks "groovy," but there's little in their info to indicate whether or not it's also usable...

This seems to fall into the category of gadgets that are cool and sci-fi, but where the practicalities and human-interface issues seem to come second to "gee whiz" value...