The Blork Blog

Yesterday I posted about my problems with the Motorola v710 and Telus. One of my problems was that Mobile TV did not work for the first two months that I had the phone. It works now, finally, but it really sucks. The sound is bad, and the picture quality is very bad.

But I suppose that’s to be expected. I certainly didn’t buy that phone for the sake of Mobile TV. You don’t need to be an expert to expect that Mobile TV will be a disappointment.

However, I am a bit annoyed about the way Telus depicts Mobile TV in their ads. They give the impression that the TV image fills the entire screen of the Motorola v710 (which has, by the way, quite a large and beautiful display). Of course this makes no sense, because a television screen is longer than it is tall, and the telephone’s screen is taller than it is long.

The image to the right is a manipulation of a picture I nabbed from Telus’s Web site. The phone on the left shows Mobile TV as Telus presents it. The phone in the middle shows my (faked) estimate of how the image really appears in terms of the true proportions — I cropped the top and bottom and kept the guy’s head about the same size. The phone on the far right shows what it would look like if you wanted the full view of the guy (and could magically recover image area on the left and right).

Clearly, the real thing differs significantly from how Telus depicts it. No doubt they have some sort of disclaimer that says “simulated image,” but this is doing more than just simulating the image. It gives a misleading depiction of how the screen actually appears, making it look like the TV image is twice as big as it really does appear.

Now add an extremely high level of compression artifacting and a frame rate of between two and four frames per second and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Shame on you, Telus. Shame on you.