There continues to be a complete misunderstanding of mobile video and how it may or may not be used. So the idea that Motorola’s Droid X can deliver Blockbuster online movies, has hardly been commented on since the device’s launch a few days ago.
More and more phones have both WiFi and HDMI out, and while this phone is being pushed as a wide 4.3 inch high resolution screen device upon which video can be watched directly, the real issue here is that it can act, as the iPhone has already been talked about, as a portable set top.
The fact that the device comes with DLNA, so that ANY video source in a network, can be controlled from a single location or remote control, and you have the scenario where Blockbuster films are drawn down a broadband line directly to the phone, across WiFi and from there out through the HDMI connector to your TV set. You can then put you phone on top of the TV and control proceedings from the TV remote using DLNA. Who need an internet TV? Who needs Apple TV? You just need a Droid X.
Ands that’s the use case for Blockbuster, go round to a friend, offer to play a film, and quietly call up a recent Blockbuster release and send it in HD through your handset to their TV. Yes it would eat your battery, but you can plug it in and recharge it while it’s sat on top of the TV.
This is starting to look like the kind of eco-system which would make AT&T iPhone customers jealous of Verizon customers, that is until Apple comes out with a streaming iTunes TV service of its own, which has been widely expected for some months.
The Droid X also offer a lot more as a phone, which most of the handsets sites have pointed out, a 1 GHz processor, so that it’s superfast when it’s not network constrained and it also has a 3G Mobile HotSpot capability where a mobile broadband connection is used to backhaul up to five WiFi connections.
It has lots of memory, the usual connection to social networks that all superphones come with these days, Adobe Flash Player 10.1 can be downloaded to it, a key point against the iPhone and access to Android Market, with its 65,000 applications. It also has a much better video ready camera than the iPhone and runs Android 2.2 and at the same $199 price for a two year contract, it’s set to become a standard design point for most of the 1GHz phones that come after it ‘ bringing video and effectively internet connectivity to your TV.