AS AN UNABASHED OLYMPICS FAN and a Winter Olympic nut (two-man luge, anyone?) I knew what I wanted during Torino 2006: The Samsung a920.
That was the little navy blue handset that Bell Canada’s beavers, Frank and Gordon talked soooo much about during their many, many, many appearances during the Olympics last month. So, I begg, er, asked the nice folks at Bell if I could test one during the Olympics. Happily, they obliged.
In a deal with the CBC, Bell was offering the Corp.’s live feed of the Olympics on the handset, as well as numerous pre-packaged features and hourly updates that ranged from a minute to four minutes each. (The phone does a bunch of other things too, like web, text, e-mail, pictures, video, and music, but what I wanted was to have the Olympics with me 24/7.)
While there’s obviously some work left to do on this technology, it worked pretty much as promised.
I was surprised just how far out into the boonies it played video. My family and I regularly hit some county roads every weekend on the way north to ski and except for about a 30 km stretch of County Road 14 between the bustling metropoli of Arthur and Flesherton, Ont. where there’s no network, the live feed of the Olympics worked seamlessly as we drove (my son was in control of the phone during the drives, in case you thought I was watching and driving) and the downloads of content – Olympic or not – worked flawlessly, too.
What shocked me most was that it worked down in the Beaver Valley where we ski. I was showing it off to a bunch of folks I saw on the hill (all thought it pretty neat-o) and even watched Canadian bobsledders Pierre Lueders and Lascelles Brown’s second run while on the chairlift. The reason I was shocked is that my Rogers Blackberry e-mail works only sporadically in that very same rural, central Ontario valley and the voice service works not at all.
On one of my rides up though, a fellow skier who also had an a920 and turned out to be a retired Bell VP told me Bell’s tower in the area was right on the edge of the valley and the Rogers tower was miles down the road.
Now, watching the Olympics on such a tiny screen is a challenge at best – good luck finding a puck, for example. At four frames per second it’s nowhere near crystal clear and flipping the phone shut to watch it on the twice-as-tiny outer screen is utterly pointless. But, the audio was loud and clear enough that I most often used it as a radio, letting it sit on the car seat as I drove or beside my computer as I worked.
It was the Olympics, live with me, wherever I went. Well, live enough, anyway. The feed to the phone lagged approximately a minute and 45 seconds behind the TV. Despite the technology’s immaturity though, I found it hard to take my eyes and ears off the thing.
Now, as with all of these little devices, battery power remains a bit of a problem. Fully charged, it was able to display video for almost three hours before needing a re-charge (using it just as a phone, the battery lasts for days, of course). That battery life is at least an hour more than I can get out of my iPod when playing video, whose nice, bright, clear moving pictures drains the battery in less than two.
While the live audio feed on the a920 was loud and clear as I said, the sound of the taped features and hourly updates was an issue. It always seemed like the phone was inside a couple of socks when playing that content, making it hard to hear, unless I put the headphones in.
The most disappointing aspect of my experience with the a920 and Bell’s EV-DO network came with the Russia-Canada quarter final hockey game. Now, I find the men’s Olympic hockey tournament annoyingly takes up too much of the overall Olympic broadcast time, but I figured I’d tune in (phone-in?) to the game anyway.
No dice though. To give a sense of what happened to the feed during that game, I’d say it was like going to a popular web site around 2001 and trying to stream video. There’s so much traffic that it just can’t work. That game never did come across clearly, no matter where I took the phone. Unrecognizable video artifacts and garbled audio. The game was a no-go on my phone, which was a disappointment, given how well it had worked to that point.
From my time with the a920, it looks to me like video to the handset will be a smash hit. It’s pretty low-definition TV right now but the networks will get better and so will the handsets.
I can’t wait until the next Olympics.
