IDTV

iPhone: texting on a touch-screen?

In all the coverage of Apple's new i-Phone, no-one seems to have mentioned that one of the major mobile telephony applications today (certainly for teens and young adults) is texting rather than voice. Indeed, in Japan, teens text or email in preference to making voice-calls. But how efficiently can you text from a touch-screen (which is what iPhone is proposing)? And do you really want the thing that you're tapping numbers on all the time and holding up to your ear to listen to be the same thing you watch video back on?

I think Steve Jobs has just taken convergence one step too far. By all means combine iTunes with mobile telephony: Apple stands a better chance of making that combination work than most. But converging all the input and output functions onto a single touch-sensitive display device may prove to be a bridge too far.

I think this one's slipped through Apple's net because Jobs and other Apple execs are all baby boomers, and they typically just don't use mobiles for texting. But if you want a new mobile phone to take off, you have to take the 11-16s with you, too, and that means making SMS as easy if not easier than before. I doubt if the iPhone's touch-screen can pull that one off.

MHP at the cross-roads

CableLabs - the US cable TV standards body - has finally published my overview of the MHP market in their SPECS newsletter (click here for the article).

Two related developments that were too late to make it into the piece:

1. Italy's Senate approved a budget bill for 2007 just before Christmas that includes a measure aimed at subsidising integrated digital TV sets (IDTVs), and which the digital-terrestrial TV lobby would dearly like to make conditional on MHP being included in the sets. If so, it would represent another big boost for the European interactive TV standard (which, incidentally, is included as part of the DVD Blu-Ray spec). Full story in this week's New Media Markets.
2. Via Licensing, the LA-based outfit which brings together the MHP patent holders in a patent licensing pool, tells me the patent-holders still haven't signed off on the MHP patent licensing agreements. Given that all it takes is a simple signature, there must be something afoot, surely (sign-off was expected by early autumn 2006). Rumour has it that one of the patent-holders could have dropped out.