A few weeks ago, I put out a video about
a personal stereo from 1986 that had a built-in LCD television.
Now, of course, on that particular device, I was unable to
receive any of the current UK TV broadcasts because they now only send
out a digital signal and it had a built-in
analogue TV tuner, and the same has to be said for any
of the pocket or...
"slightly larger than pocket" televisions of the '80s
and '90s, in the UK at least, because they've turned
off the digital signal, I can no longer wander around with one of
these and pick up a TV broadcast.
But that video got a few people into asking me
"Well, why don't they make pocket, or 'portable'
DIGITAL televisions?" and the answer is, well,
they DO, but unfortunately, they don't work
very well, but it's not entirely the fault of the
manufacturers, it's a little bit of a confusing tale,
so let me go into it in a bit more detail,
and I'll also demonstrate one of the current crop of
"portable" digital televisions. So, let's
get on with it.
[*Music*]
Now, I'm based in The UK and the digital
broadcast started for terrestrial television over here
is called DVBT and
DVBT-2. As
you can see from the map that's on screen now, there are
quite a few different starters used around the world, but
talking about this from a UK perspective, DVB
was introduced in 1998, and it uses
an MPEG-2 transport stream.
DVBT-2 was an update
to the standard which was introduced into The UK in
November 2009, and this one
uses MPEG-4, at least in the variation
used over here, to broadcast the HD
signals on terrestrial TV.
Now, the digital and analogue signals existed
side-by-side for quite a while (remember, digital came on in
1998, while analogue only started to be turned
off in 2007).
The area that I'm in was switched off in 2009
and the whole system was completely discontinued
for all regions by 2012, leaving people
just with a digital signal, killing off
devices like this.
However, it wasn't supposed to be like this, because there is a
standard that was developed for broadcasting to
hand-held televisions called DVB-H,
and it was first introduced in the UK in
2005, in a trial that took place in
Oxford, where the people with the compatible
equipment were able to receive 16 digital
channels.
The initial response was positive; big things were expected of DVB-H,
and indeed, the European commission
decided that DVB-H was going to be the
broadcast standard for mobile television in Europe.
Unfortunately, though, they dragged their
heels a little bit in deciding this; as you can see, the date in the middle
says July 2007. In this article,
it says they want it rolled out "as soon as possible",
but of course, that involves building a network of
transmitters and also getting the manufacturers on board, and
time was ticking. In The UK, the first 3G
mobile network had been launched on the 3rd of March 2003,
so that's four years before the EU commission
decided what broadcast standard they want for hand-held digital
TV. Now, the first few years of
3G in The UK were a pretty fallow period;
the three mobile operators at one point were just giving away their
handsets to try to get enough people to sign up to the service,
and I got one of these out of them which did
video calls and things (bit of a clunker), but if I trade it in now,
I'll get 4p for it, so at least I made four pence profit on
the deal. But despite those faltering first steps, by
the time the iPhone 3G came out in
2008 (or, insert your own preference of handset here),
the 3G networks were quite well-
established; there were a number of different ones operating,
and yet, still, the DVB-H receivers
hadn't appeared in the stores.
However, elsewhere in Europe, the DVB-H standard
was enjoying a little bit more success.
It had gone beyond the initial trials and was being rolled
out on a limited basis in a number of countries.
But, if you look now to see
who is using DVB-H,
if we click on the link at the top which takes you to the official website,
that pretty much tells us everything we need to know.
Yes; as far as Europe is concerned, it appears that
DVB-H withered on the vine.
Now, while I haven't been able to find any recent details of
European countries that are still using this standard, if you
do know of any, please put some details in the comments.
Meanwhile, over in South Korea, things
were very different.
They'd adopted a different standard of hand-held digital television;
rather than DVB-H, they were using T-DMB.
But it pretty much did the same thing, but the crucial
difference was they hadn't dragged their heels with it; they'd managed to
get it out around about 2005,
back when phones looked like this. So this
is the era where a mobile phone wouldn't do much more
than make phone calls or send text messages, so
the idea of being able to receive live TV broadcasts on one
from about a dozen or so channels definitely
had an appeal, especially when you don't have to pay any
data costs for it.
Now, the Korean DMB system, as well as broadcasting television signals, also
sent out digital radio, and it's very
similar to the digital radio system we use here in The UK
called DAB, and in October 2006,
in The UK, Virgin launched a mobile
phone which could receive five television channels
over the DAB network and I did own
one of these for a little while and it definitely
worked, but unfortunately it was a bit of a clunky phone; it didn't
appeal to people at the time compared to the
other phones that were available, and the service was
discontinued in January 2008.
So, when it comes to hand-held digital television, it seems that
South Korea are the exceptions to the rule; it's still in
use today, and there are perhaps a
dozen or so channels that most people
can receive on the devices. However,
it doesn't seem to be offered in the latest
flag-ship phones; I was looking on the
Korean Samsung website and they don't mention it on the
top-of-the-range phones, it's only on lower
models in the range, and of course it does require a little
aerial to come out of the top of the phone, so you can't really fit
it in the latest slim-line model, so perhaps even
South Korea are falling out of love with
hand-held digital television.
OK, so that's the back-story over and done with, but what
hand-held digital television can I buy here and now?
Well, this is a model that I've chosen, it's a little bit larger than
hand-held,
and it's unbranded; you won't find these from Sony or Casio
anymore, and you can see on here this
is a DVBT and T2 model but they do
a few different standards as well, and this one cost me
approximately £45.
Let's take a look at the specs; starting at the top here,
"Super slim fashion design". Well, that's important.
"7-inch screen"; moving down a little bit, it's got a
1200mah battery, it's got a built-in PVR,
it can play various media files as well, as we can see there,
the resolution (towards the bottom), 800x480,
which isn't bad for a screen of this
size, and of course it does DVB-T and
T-2, so it should be able to receive the HD broadcasts.
So, let's get everything out of the
box and have a good look at it. We got the user manual,
we got the remote control in a really nasty shade of fawn
and we got a wire here
for sending video into this because you can use it as
just a monitor; so that's got the composite inputs
on there; you've got a little tiny aerial
and then we've got the power brick here, and if we just
have a look at this, it's got a Euro-plug on it,
and the voltage is on here; you can see a multi-voltage,
so I'll need to put an adapter on that if I'm gonna use it. The cable
on that is ridiculously short, it's just over a metre
(approximately 3.5 feet), which,
in my opinion, isn't sufficient, but I'll just have to
put up with it. Inside the other box we've got the television itself,
which feels very light-weight and insubstantial.
Once we take this screen protector off here, we can see we've got a matte
screen, which gets rid of reflections, which is nice; the
stickers on here look like they've been thrown at it from a distance,
and they're not quite on straight; we've got an infrared receiver
on the bottom there, and along the top we've got
a selection of buttons which enable us to
operate various things, get through the menus, etcetera.
Now, if we just have a look around the back, you can see there's no buttons
on that side; there are all the inputs and things are on this
side; so I've got those laid out there, I don't need to
read them to you, but you can see you've got a headphone output on there
as well; we got a little
leg that goes out of the bottom here which enables you to
stand it up, of course (a little kick-stand).
And also, on the back, we've got a tripod
screw mount so you could perhaps attach it to something that way;
two speakers on here, I'm not too sure what that's about. Are they stereo,
one above the other,
or is it just both of them play the same thing? But there are
a speaker behind each one of those and it receives a
12v input which of course will presumably be
to do with using it as a kinda device in a
caravan or some kind of RV; you know, sending a 12v
power supply from a vehicle into it.
I'm plugging this into the wall, of course,
and I've got a little aerial out here,
you can see the lights flashing on the left there; that indicates the battery
is charging (it's got a little battery in it as we've mentioned
before). The remote control has all the buttons
on it that you'll need for a digital television.
And, um, it needs some batteries though, so I'll just
open this up and put a couple of AAAs
into here.
So, putting the cover back onto there,
I thought "Well, let's just press the 'On' button and see what happens",
and...nothing happens.
I thought "Oh no, it's not broken, is it? I can't be bothered sending this back", but
having a look around, I noticed there's an On/Off switch on the side here as well,
so, slide that up, and you can see the other
LED comes on at the bottom there (the left
one's a charging one, the right one is the power).
Goes green when it's on, got the menu coming on.
And I thought this was amusing: if you look at the bottom of the screen here, the little bar
there tells you the last channel it received (presumably the one they
got on it when they were testing it). And it received
Cambodia Video. Well, unfortunately, I can't pick up
Cambodia Video in my house, I'm gonna have to re-tune it
so it receives the signals that are available
in my area. So, going into the menus here,
selecting the automatic tuning,
pick that I want just to use the DTV 'cause there's no
analogue TV in my area, click "UK"
and then it just starts scanning for channels.
Now, I've never had any luck with these little tiny
aerials, but I thought "I'll give it a go, perhaps this time it's gonna be the
time that it works", but I let it go through the entire
process and as you can see at the bottom there, (and all the way up,
for that matter), it's found nothing at all. It's got
to 100%, didn't find a single thing, so
I thought "Well, I'll try out the media player functionality, at least
we'd better get some video playing on it", and you can put video
files on a USB stick or on a
Micro-SD card, and I've put an .mkv on here,
an .mov and an .mp4 just to try
all three out, and I've got to say all three worked fine.
This is an .mkv that I've got playing on it here,
which I downloaded from somewhere... [*mumbling*] oh, you know,
don't-, don't tell anyone. Uh, as you can see, we've got a lotta-
options across the bottom of the screen for scanning through it, pausing,
all that kinda stuff. It works really well as a media player. This is a
1080p file, as well,
and of course, if you got subtitles, you can get those to
pop up, which is quite nice. So, as a little media player for
?faulty? old parents, you know, it's not that bad. There's a bit of a
downside to it, though: it will only accept a
4GB, uh, file size as a maximum, so
if, for example, you had a film that was seven
and a half gigs, or something, where you couldn't put that on it because it only accepts the
FAT file format, but as you can see you get a nice little
pop-up to show you what the file is; little preview
of it as you move your, uh, cursor over it; but, anyway,
enough of that, let's get back to what we're here for: trying to watch digital
television on this thing.
Now, I'd left it charging for
about 4 hours or so; that little red LED on the
left goes solid when it's finished charging, so,
I thought I'll try it on the batteries to see how long that lasts.
And I also took it downstairs, put the aerial as high up
as I could get it away from the device in the conservatory
here, I thought there was a bit more sort of sky there and less things in the way,
did a scan, again; absolutely nothing at all, so
went out in the garden, put the aerial on top of a wooden
mushroom, did a scan there; again,
not a sausage, completely sausage-less. So I went back inside,
plugged the aerial from the house (the one that's on the roof)
into the side of this; I thought "Well, let's see if it's working at all".
Did a scan, and sure enough it is, there's no problem there;
with a proper aerial, I got, what's that, a hundred
odd different television channels on there, as well as some other stuff
and the video comes through perfectly; no break-ups
at all. Uh, quite nice and sharp, really. Of course, I'm
in a room with a lot of reflections, here; there's light coming through the ceiling, but
you could still see it. You can see across the screen there as I
jump between channels, it comes up with the information about what the channel
is, uh, the name of the program
that's on it, a bit of information, whether it's got subtitles
or not, just like a normal digital TV, which we tend to call
freeview televisions here, in The UK. But we've got
little channel lists that we can go down to look through all the different,
uh, channels it's picked up, and they're all working exactly
how they should. I've got to say, the sound on this is tinny.
Very tinny through those little speakers. I get a very
metallic sound. Unpleasant, really;
you wouldn't want to listen to it for a long period of time,
but you can always plug it into an external speaker, I suppose, but then it's
losing the point of it being a portable device.
Now, the power just went off, and that was after
only twenty minutes of using it on the batteries.
I've tried this again; I charged it up overnight,
tried it again, I only got twenty minutes out of the battery.
So it's got a twenty minute battery life, I've got
to say that. Anyway, the next thing I want to point out; it's got a built-in PVR
functionality. So, if you've got a Micro-SD card
into here, you can pause telly, you can rewind it, you can set
programs to record, you can see I put the subtitles
on the screen here now, so it's a really
fully-featured, little freeview
television.
Also, if you look through here, I've got the program guide that's slowly
populating with the names of the programs that are coming up.
But it takes a little while for that data to come through.
Unfortunately, though, there is a bit of a problem: I was trying to use the BBC
interactive stuff, and you press the red button
on the cross at the bottom of the remote, and you normally
move up and down with your remote control to select things; however, if you press
down or up, it just changes the channel, so it drops
you out of the interactive stuff and moves to the next channel.
I tried that a few different ways. I've noticed you can't type the number in
of the item you want;
for example, I've typed "sport" in here on page 300,
but when it comes up again, I'm supposed to go up and down the page
to select things and, as soon as you do that, it drops you out
of the interactive stuff. So yeah; forget the interactive stuff, but
I'm also interested in this aerial; is this aerial broken?
Is it particularly bad? I thought "You know what, I'm gonna try and get
a different one". So I went on Amazon, I looked at the best aerial
that they had (well, the best selling one, anyway)
for £10.95; a portable aerial (obviously, I'm not
carrying around a massive aerial that you'd put on a roof or something).
Gotta be something that matches with a TV.
It's got a weighted base on this, it's got a magnetic
base; I thought "Well, this'll be the one, let's try
it out properly". So again, nothing upstairs,
nothing downstairs, in the conservatory at all,
so I went upstairs again, hung the aerial
out a window, started to get a bit of a signal on it,
but it was breaking up a lot, just, uh, have a listen to this.
[*Speaking*]
[*Distorted speaking and popping noises*]
So, I'd say that was unwatchable,
so then I took the device out in the garden and actually managed to get
a good signal on it if I stood exactly
like this in this spot. Now, I'm in a house
that doesn't get a particularly good TV reception, I think there's a lot of things
in the way of it, so the next thing I thought I'd do I'll take it out
in the car when I went shopping, so I put my little aerial
on the dashboard here and sure enough, in the middle of this
car-park, I was getting a really decent signal, but
as you can see, it's very variable depending on where you are,
so unfortunately, with a device like this, you just can't be sure that you gonna get
a good signal; it's completely down to the luck of the draw
but unfortunately, due to the failure of DVB-H,
a portable DVBT, television like this is as good as I'm going to get.
OK, so what, if anything, have we learnt from that? Well, as far as
this particular TV goes, I'd only call it a portable television
in the traditional sense of the term;
by that I mean like a portable TV from the 1970s
or '80s, which probably would've been a 14 inch
CRT screen and the thing that made it portable
was the fact it had a handle on the top, which meant you could lug it
around somewhere else and plug it into power if you wanted to use it
in a different location. Even though, of course, this is a lot more light-
weight than that, the same, uh, idea applies
that to be able to use it, you need to plug it into power.
It does have that twenty minute battery in here, but I'm not sure
why; a bit of an anomaly. Who needs a twenty minute battery
in a TV? Maybe it's just to keep hold of the settings or something.
Now, there might be some people that would think "Well, hold on, I could
perhaps plug it into the power supply on
a train; they do have sockets on some of the trains in The UK and watch TV there".
Well, nah, it wouldn't really work, unfortunately; because of the
way DVBT works, the signal would cut
out all the time; that's if you got any signal at all.
However, you could perhaps use this in a, say, motor-
home, you could take it away with you, uh, plug it into
the power in there, put the lead into
the aerial that's up on the roof, you'd probably get a pretty decent signal.
But then again, the screen's a bit too small for that; it kind of
falls between two stools. Perhaps there's somebody somewhere,
sitting in a shed, overlooking a car-park all
day that wouldn't mind one of these just to
put in there to keep their eye on what's going on in the television; and
if there is, I'll put some links to this in the video description.
But yeah, unfortunately, as far as pocket
TVs go, it is now really
a thing of the past, but of course, we've got smartphones,
uh, with 4G and soon to be 5G.
On those, you can pretty much stream all the
video that you need; so yeah, it might not be all
the live TV channels that are available, but
as we soar from when they offered trials
of these DVB-H services,
uh, they didn't really take off; people weren't
interested, and that was in the very early days of people
having, uh, smartphones or mobile phones, really, in their pockets, so, nowadays,
if they try to launch DVB-H, they just wouldn't get any
take-up at all. So yeah,
Pocket TVs: Thing of the past, but with
now in the future, we've got other things instead, so,
that's it for the moment; as always, thanks for watching.
[*Music*]
[*Tape rolling*]