Watching movies on smartphones has in the past had its drawbacks – picture quality, screen size and memory limitations among the most obvious.
Those are fading rapidly but it seems that delivering video content to mobiles is occupying a lot of people’s attention.
In the US Alltel Wireless is offering buyers of the new touchscreen Samsung Delve a free 2 GB microSD memory card if they buy the handset before April 16.
What makes the offer interesting is that Paramount Pictures will put the Mission: Impossible trilogy on the card.
At last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, smartphone-biz-news spoke to Marine Desoutter, marketing manager with Mobilclip, about its video compression technology that puts movies on memory cards.
She said the French company has distributed over 100 movie titles worldwide on Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung handsets.
"Mobile video consumers have not had an optimal experience with video quality on their devices," she said.
"To change their perception and really deliver on expectations that video quality on mobile devices must match TV or PC quality, the same experience needs to be delivered."
Desoutter said Mobiclip memory card movies provided full screen display on QVGA handsets (320×240 pixels), 25 frames per second and highly optimized codec for lower battery consumption.
The memory cards can be used on any handset with a card slot running Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, Palm or Linux operating systems.
Certainly the quality of the video can’t be faulted but whether movie deals bundled with mobiles will become a standard feature in the near future remains to be seen.
A survey just released suggests that embedded content is an increasingly strong influence in swaying consumers’ mobile purchase decisions.
So perhaps the offer of some blockbuster movies on a memory card will be equally persuasive.
We’d be interested in hearing if you think that’s so.
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