Mobile TV phone anyone?

Product: Glofiish V900
web: www.glofiish.com

THE DVB-T MOBILE digital television format has finally taken off in a few places - Taiwan has a dozen channels for your personal enjoyment there, if you're familiar with the lingo, of course. So do Ozzies and Singaporeans. In the latter case, there is just one channel, TV Mobile, albeit at full TV resolution.

Does it make sense to have this in a mobile phone? After Samsung's initial forays, other vendors offer such models now too. E-ten (now Acer) Glofiish V900 is the newest kid on the block - and one of the most powerful ones as well.

The new phone, slightly more compact than its predecessor, does have a fresh case design and goes with full touch interface using SPB Shell on top of Windoze Mobile 6.1, plus the 3-D transition effects for the file and program browsing. While the CPU is the same Samsung S3C 6400 533 MHz, the RAM amount was doubled to 128 MB catering to the ever larger apps footprint here.

Not exactly an Iphone here, but the 3.5G HSDPA device has a better screen than the Apple's offering at 640x480 full VGA resolution - a crucial plus for any TV watching I guess, even at just 2.8 inches. The usual dual-mode WiFi and SiRF Star III GPS are there as well. The photo camera was beefed up to 3.2 Mpix this time with flash. The few pics I took look sharper and a bit less blurry than before.

If using the touch mode with fingertips instead of the supplied pen, the sensitivity could be beefed up a little, otherwise the new phone is a fine piece of work, with sufficiently loud speakers too. How about the TV though?

I tuned into Singapore's local TV Mobile manually at 602 MHz, as the phone didn't have presets for this channel. The Mobile TV player applet takes about 5 seconds to start, and the load of particular channel requires a few seconds more. You do need to extend out that antenna to actually detect the signal.

The picture is pretty good for a mobile device, as it matches the TV signal resolution nearly pixel for pixel. If you're not happy with the smallish screen, there is a bundled TV out cable to get that signal out to a normal TV screen.

E-ten offers similar looks and the same SPB shell in lower resolution on the X610 mid range phone. However, I feel they need to focus more on quality "flag bearer" high end models to take away the glory from the likes of HTC.

For instance, a Wide WGA 800x480 3.5-inch display phone with Internet scrolling capability at full web page width and more memory to handle it (HTC has 288 MB in their high end model); a similar QWERTY keyboard version with improved keyboard layout; and of course further camera improvements.

Overall, Glofiish phones are getting better by the day: the time is now to find an, umm, more appropriate sounding brand here?

Good: Hi-res display, good looks, usable mobile TV viewing
Bad: Touch sensitivity could be improved a bit
Ugly: Well, let's work on that brand name...
Bartender's verdict: 8 out of 10