Orange has taken the unusual step of developing its own Star Trek style mobile video phone, saying it couldn’t wait for established handset manufacturers to produce something similar.

Developed in-house, with help from Microsoft and the University of Strathclyde, Orange’s video phone, shown to VNU Newswire this week, is a chunky device that includes a video camera, colour screen, a Windows CE based personal organiser and a GSM mobile phone.

The unnamed device is only a prototype at the moment, but Orange hopes to have a working version by the end of the year. A commercial version, weighing around 350g and costing about £500 is planned for April or May next year.

Orange says it has developed the product in-house for a number of reasons. Mainly because it doesn’t seem to want to wait for hardware manufacturers to develop a similar product. But also because it says it wants to produce video, or at least visible versions of some of its new wireless application protocol (WAP) information services, being launched next month.

Senior product manager Adrian Turner said vendors like Nokia and Ericsson are likely to be waiting until higher bandwidth mobile services, such as GPRS or third generation (3G) UMTS, are available before launching mobile video phones.

“We don’t see why we should have to wait for 3G to come along to be able to deliver 3G type services,” said Turner.

The biggest hurdle to providing mobile video is bandwidth. At present, GSM networks only permit data transfer at 9.6Kbps. Orange is poised to boost the data speed on its network to 28.8Kbps this autumn, using high speed circuit switched data (HSCSD) technology.

Video quality will also be improved, Orange claims, by using a new compression technology developed by the University of Strathclyde, called Strathclyde Compression Technology. These two technologies will give “credible” quality video, said Turner.

As well as being able to conduct video telephony, the device can be used to take digital photographs and video clips lasting up to one minute.

Microsoft is believed to have played a major role in the development of the phone, although Orange won’t discuss specifics. The phone will use Windows CE as its operating system and will include many of the applications that come with CE, such as its microbrowser, Pocket Explorer.

The deal is a good win for Microsoft which faces stiff competition in the mobile phone operating system market from Symbian, the venture backed by Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Psion and Matsushita. Asked why Orange didn’t chose Symbian, Turner said it favoured the maturity of the CE platform, over the relatively new Symbian.

“Timescales meant we needed something here and now,” he said. “We’re prepared to relook at Symbian in the future.”

See also:

Orange to slash prepaid mobile phone prices in the UK

Orange is planning to cut its prepaid mobile phone packages in the UK by up to 50 per cent in an attempt to boost usage.  27 Oct 1999

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