HDMI Why?

I often marvel at the mobile industry’s unwavering pursuit of the next technology, irrespective of small details like a business case, consumer demand or day-to-day practicalities. The eye-controlled headphones on NTT DoCoMo’s stand at Mobile World Congress were an extreme but highly entertaining example. At least the headphones aren’t a commercial reality. Yet.

The launch of 3G networks has to be the best illustration of technology first, business case later. The fact that those networks are now creaking at the seams is more by accident than design and it took five years of desperate discussion about a killer app for them before we got there.

HTC’s new Evo handset (right) strikes me as another example. Now I must stress that the Evo is a great phone for all sorts of reasons. What I struggle with is the fanfare surrounding its HDMI out port. The technology is certainly impressive, especially when you see the Evo pushing 720p video onto an 85-inch TV. It’s a huge endorsement of Qualcomm’s 1 GHz Snapdragon chipset and it’s a point of differentiation for HTC before the inevitable flurry of devices with HDMI later in the year.

But an HDMI port is an expensive component that adds to a device’s bill of materials. In a hugely price-sensitive market it’s debatable whether the inclusion of HDMI adds value or simply strains profit margins. To answer that you have to look at how people might use it.

The Evo has an eight-megapixel camera capable of shooting 720p video. HDMI offers a hassle-free means of viewing HD footage on a large display. But I’d question how many people will do this. Video recording is a prominent feature on a huge proportion of mobile phones and many devices can already connect to a TV via a composite audiovisual cable. Again, I’d bet the number of owners who have done so is tiny. HD video might be an added attraction for some, but the need to buy an HDMI cable is probably going to put many people off, especially as they’re not cheap. Most consumer devices, such as Blu-ray players, don’t come with an HDMI cable, so it’s highly unlikely phones will have one in the box (the Evo press release states a cable is sold separately).

The case for playing back entertainment videos on phones via HDMI is similarly questionable. The mobile phone isn’t a personal entertainment hub as some suggest. Like most people, I have music and video distributed across a PC, games console and a PVR (the real entertainment hubs). This content is generally side-loaded onto a mobile device (where possible), and increasingly it’ll be accessed through the cloud (spectrum and bandwidth permitting).

This then raises the question: what content is there on the phone that needs HDMI output? The chances are it came from a device already connected to a larger screen. Admittedly, operators and manufacturers are offering video download services, but they’ve seen limited success to date.

Of course, services and use cases are continually evolving, so it’d be foolhardy of me to dismiss HDMI on phones entirely. Yet tethering a phone to a large screen seems completely at odds with the industry’s vision of seamless convergence. The handsets with integrated HDMI are likely to support media-sharing technologies like DLNA and UPnP, and at much lower cost. DLNA has its teething problems and it’s not ubiquitous, but that’s changing rapidly. Samsung’s latest handsets (the Wave and Galaxy S) are both capable of delivering HD video (via DLNA) without the added cost of an HDMI port.

I suspect I’m railing against the inevitable here. Several phones will offer an HDMI connector this year, meaning it will rapidly become a must-have for high-end devices. However, I’m left with the thought that operating in a margin-pressured industry seems to count for nothing in our pursuit of technology for technology’s sake.