The LG Arena is the first mainstream phone from LG, which was not built primarily for mobile TV, which has been retrofitted to receive MediaFLO broadcast TV. This is one of the major tipping points for any mobile TV technology ‘ getting the relevant chip into devices which are mainstream in a handset vendor’s catalog and the announcement this week that AT&T will take the Arena, plus a FLO chip, could seriously change the so far moribund fortunes of FLO TV in the US.
The write ups though are less than flattering. American media seems to believe that phones cannot cost $200 because that’s what AT&T charges for a top end iPhone, and surely everyone wants an iPhone. But of course they don’t.
So when they see a phone for $200 writers and analysts there simply write it off, but many of them do quite well. The Arena is small, it’s true, particularly the screen, at just 3 inches, but the device was launched a year ago at the Mobile World Congress, and delivered in Europe five months ago.
It is the first LG phone to sport the S-Class interface, a 3D cube that can be twirled and spun by your finger and then explored, using touch actions. It is reminiscent of a fruit machine reel or a Rubic’s cube and all the embedded applications such as the clock and the radio all use touch to control them, for instance pushing the clock hands round with your fingers when setting an alarm or touching a graphic of an old radio tuning knob so set the radio station. LG has now put this same interface on Windows and Android phones. The device has accelerometer and proximity sensors and will work with AT&T’s 7.2 HSPA network.
The strength of the iPhone was initially in access to music. Other phones now have access to music. Then it was in access to video and music, and finally it was access to lots and lots of applications, many of them silly, which no-one will use more than twice.
But video on iTunes cannot be streamed and must be downloaded, while other streaming video applications at the Apple App Store, many of which have appeared, are reliant on the underlying network to stream and in many cases are only allowed delivery over wi-fi, not over 3G.
So when a MediaFLO phone emerges, one which has a separate receiver chip which can give access to broadcast TV in the US, this will give a superior video experience to any that the iPhone offers. The LG Arena has been out for a while in Europe, but has not previously been tied with any other mobile TV service.
The phones comes with GPS, a 5 megapiexal camera, integrated WiFi, has memory expandable to 40 GB; and supports both DivX and Xvid video formats and has only been out for about 5 months in Europe.
The AT&T deal is $200 based on a two year contract (after a $50 mail-in rebate). The question for this phone is whether FLO TV has failed so far because it has no cool devices or because (as we have maintained) the content is quite simply not good enough. Or both.
The LG Arena is billed as a smartphone but is not one really because it has no operating system, as have many LG and Samsung phones in the recent past, which have all features hardwired into them. FLO TV from AT&T costs an additional $9.99 a month and new subscribers using the Arena will get a 7 day free TV trial.
If the Arena goes well, it may blaze a trail for the newer Arena Max at AT&T, just announced, but not yet out. And if FLO on this goes well, it might change the entire landscape for Mobile TV in the US.
Over the coming weeks ATSC M/H devices will be hitting the streets in the US, mostly from LG and for the existing mass mobile TV trial running in the Washington area. So this is really the last chance for FLO to make progress, before ATSC M/H begins the long process of coming to market and more than muddying the waters. One top handset is probably nothing like enough.