LG HB620T with DVB-T

Expected May 2008 (Germany)
1st May 2008

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The LG HB620T is a strange looking device, with a wide aspect screen and an antenna that sticks out of the back. The reason for these odd looks is simple - the HB620T includes a DVB-T digital TV receiver.

DVB-T is what most people would regard as a "standard" terrestrial digital TV signal, used in the UK for Freeview boxes and pretty much everywhere else in Europe for over-the-air digital TV. Until recently, most of the handful of mobile phones that could receive a digital TV signal used DVB-H, a variation of the domestic DVB-T signal, but designed for mobile devices. The Nokia N77, N92 and Samsung F510 are a few examples of handsets with DVB-H built in.

So why did LG choose DVB-T for the HB620T? Simply because DVB-H coverage is limited to a small number of places, and DVB-T is available pretty much everywhere. But DVB-T has two major drawbacks, one of which is that the transmitters work on different frequencies which means that a DVB-T receiver will have to rescan when it moves between transmitters, whereas DVB-H is designed to use the same frequency between all transmitters in a network. The video signal on DVB-H has also been adjusted to mean that it requires less power to decode it, so mobile DVB-T devices will tend to drain the battery quite quickly.

To put it another way.. DVB-T will give you digital TV coverage pretty much anywhere, but you might want to keep your charger handy.

By their very nature, mobile phones with TV receivers in tend to look a little odd, beacause TV pictures are wide (landscape) and most phone screens are tall (portrait) ratio devices. Some manufacturers have come up with rotating screens and handsets that lie on their side, but LG have gone for the simple approach of mounting a 2" 320 x 320 pixel panel rotated by 90 degrees. It's a simple approach, and it means that the LG HB620T can "sit up" on its keypad. One obvious downside is that a 2" display is quite small, for comparison the Nokia N77 has a 2.4" display, and the N96 comes with a 2.8" display.

When you get past the HB620T's digital TV capabilities, you find that this is a pretty typical HSDPA clamshell phone. It weighs 110 grams, which is about average for a 3.5G phone and comes with a 2 megapixel camera, multimedia player, microSD expandable memory, Bluetooth, a web browser and email client. The HB620T's 7.2 Mbps maximum download speed means that it can also access streaming multimedia.

The LG HB620T will be available on Vodafone's SuperFlat tariff for just under €100 when taken with the €39.95 call plan. Vodafone expect to have the HB620T available in the next couple of weeks.