LG announces new cell phone that recieves Sat TV, pauses, rewinds, FF
It’s no surprise that the next big thing in satellite phones and satellite TV should come from South Korea, the most wired country in the world. We reported on the phenomenon of South Korean Sat TV phones before, but the new model from LG is special. Not only does it recieve satellite TV broadcasts, but you can pause your program if, say, a call comes in.
In a demonstration here, the phone was shown tuned into a satellite TV program. When a call was received, a message appeared on screen offering the user the option to pause the program and take the call. When the option was accepted, the phone immediately began recording the TV broadcast to its internal memory and freezing the image on the screen. When the call was done, the phone began showing the recorded program from the moment it was paused but still continued to record the program in its memory. In such a way, users have the illusion that they have paused a live broadcast.
The phone packs 80MB of internal memory and can record up to an hour of programming, said Lee Chang Kyu, an LG Electronics representative at the show.
Awesome? Totally.
The handset is called either LG-SB130 or KB1300, depending on the carrier version. For your viewing satisfaction… Le fone!
October 18th, 2005 at 3:51 pm
[...] Fresh from Infoworld.nl. We know the satellite TV phone is cool, but, really, how good is the reception? For several hours I walked around central Seoul with the phone tuned in to one of the video channels. It worked flawlessly in the street, didn’t show any glitches when I sat down to lunch in a coffee shop, and kept in tune with the TV channel as I descended into the subway. Even on subway trains between stations, deep under the city streets, the gap fillers provided a strong-enough signal that I could continue watching TV without interruption — much to the interest of fellow passengers. [...]