Barry Fox

The cellphone companies have now their sights set on the home entertainment market. Microsoft and Intel already dream of us all using a Windows PC with broadband and Wi-Fi to bring music and movies into the living room and round the house.

The cell approach is for us to use a multimedia phone or PDA for downloading and then connect it to a home hi-fi or video by Bluetooth. The two very different approaches have one thing in common: blissful ignorance of the consumer electronics world, and the way that music lovers and movie buffs want to spend their spare time.

A few people will, of course, get a kick out of battering a computer or cellphone into submission; there is always an element of challenge in getting a PC or picture phone to do what it should. But people who like music and movies do not often want to learn how to download, make tea during slow boot-ups and twiddle thumbs while everything slows to a crawl because the processor is doing something clever in the background.

That's why some entrepreneurs are already onto a nice little earner, downloading songs into iPods for trendies who can't or won't do it themselves.

Every time I go to a Wintel event and see cheery executives demonstrating 'clean' Media PCs, prepared earlier and uncluttered with third-party software, I yearn to be a fly on the wall when they are alone at home and are hit by a virus or Trojan, or the PC is not responding after one too many clicks.

Will they still be so cheery when digital TV reception stops because, to quote Hauppauge's advisory on XP SP2, "the operating system blocks IP traffic to/from the Hauppauge product".

The once-cheery Wintel executive may see that there is a lot to said for a simple box that switches on and off at the push of a button, does one thing at a time and needs no virus protection or firewall as it doesn't connect to the internet.

Nokia is mad keen on Visual Radio and Mobile TV. Visual Radio pairs free FM radio broadcasts with a costly cellphone connection to deliver the kind of track-now-playing information available free from DAB.

Mobile TV uses the new DVB-H system to transmit digital TV to a mobile, and encrypts free programmes so that they can only be viewed on a TV-enabled phone when cellular calls are sucking money from the viewer.

At the launch of Vodafone's 3G service we endured Sir Trevor McDonald conducting a mock news interview with chief executive Arun Sarin. Three times Sarin promised "CD-quality sound" from 3G mobiles. I dug into the menus of the demonstration phones that were playing through headphones; mp4 music files were streaming at 60Kbits/sec - around one-twenty-fifth the data rate for CD.

Motorola sees Bluetooth as its pathway into home entertainment. Bluetooth already uses SBC (Sub Band Coding); the audio signal is split into four or eight frequency bands, for coding with Adaptive PCM at whatever bit rate is available.

Quality is pretty poor and, because Bluetooth power is very low, the range is 10 metres. This is a good way to reduce interference with other Bluetooth devices and Wi-Fi on the same 2.4GHz band, and it's fine for connecting a headset to a phone.

But early in 2005 Motorola will launch the new DC800 Home Gateway which sits alongside a conventional hi-fi to receive digital audio that is being 'streamed' from a Bluetooth phone up to 100m away. The Gateway converts the Bluetooth digital audio to analogue audio and feeds it into the amplifier's conventional analogue inputs. Motorola claims "near-CD quality".

In theory, yes. New Class 1 circuitry is more sensitive than the current Class 2, and this increases range tenfold. But interference risk increases too. So v1.2 of the transmission standard lets devices hop frequencies. And the new A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile) lets a Bluetooth link carry compressed stereo at 700Kbits/sec, which could in theory match CD quality.

Doubtless this is why Motorola took a licence to use Apple's iTunes in July. Quite how the music industry will take to the idea of near CD-quality music streaming round the home after Digital Rights Management has been stripped by the handset, remains to be seen.

More to the point, Bluetooth is still flaky. At the end of Motorola's briefing, we were given several Bluetooth devices to try. I tried them. Motorola's wireless speaker would not work properly with a Nokia phone, and Motorola's Bluetooth PC dongle for a PC would not work at all with a Windows XP PC.

I sent Motorola detailed notes of the incompatibilities. After a month and many reminders, I finally got brush-off answers which ignored most of what I had asked, and suggested that users needed to "learn more about Windows XP Service Pack 2".

No wonder the firms which specialise in multi-room hi-fi installations still use good old-fashioned cables instead of wireless links.

Put this together with the news that Symantec is now selling antivirus protection for multimedia phones and what have you got? A big clear pointer that 'no socket for a phone line needed' could be the next unique selling point for home entertainment hardware, along with 'no need for a cellphone connection either' and 'no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth required'.

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