Virgin's First Mobile TV Handset Sighted

"The first handset in the UK to support mobile broadcast TV has appeared in a Carphone Warehouse brochure, which quotes a September release date." The release date wasn't confirmed by Virgin (which is the telco putting out the phone), which said the release date was still changing and it could be "a little later on".

The catalogue has Virgin Mobile's Lobster 700 TV device — designed by HTC and running on Windows Mobile 5.0 — listed in the "coming soon" section.


The device will be the first in the UK to provide broadcast television to mobiles through the DAB-IP (Digital Audio Broadcasting — Internet Protocol) standard, which is a new extension of the popular digital radio platform DAB.

A rival standard, called DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting — Handheld) will theoretically provide a greater range of channels, but has been held up because the spectrum it needs isn't available in the UK.

Both standards promise a better user experience than previous efforts at TV handsets, which have been based on bandwidth-hungry 3G technology and have generally been limited to short clips.