Samsung said it is working on a joint software platform for both mobile phones and TVs, another indication that mobile and home entertainment are rapidly converging.
"We have a plan to have a single platform for Samsung TV and phones," Kyungsik Kevin Lee, vice president at Samsung's Visual Display Division, told Reuters in an interview. Lee said the project is still being developed and did not provide a launch date. Samsung already produces Internet-connected TVs.
There are only a few other companies that can effectively straddle the line between mobile phones and home entertainment, including Samsung's South Korean rival LG and Sony Ericsson, which counts Japan's Sony as one of its parents. LG is already trying to merge the two realms.
LG has said said its Optimus 7 phone, running on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform, will allow users to share DLNA content across multiple platforms (say, for instance, an LG TV). The feature will be pre-installed on the device, and will allow users to share content from the phone's media galleries without starting another application. Users also can share content to other devices within a specified WiFi zone.
Other companies are trying to capitalize on this covergence. Motorola (NYSE:MOT) has dropped clues about what kind of products it might produce from the combination of its handset unit and its set-top box division, which will be spun off early next year as a separate publicly traded company, Motorola Mobility.
The company filed a trademark application over the summer for something called "Family Room" with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that strongly hints at media sharing products. Little is known about the proposed product, but according to the filing it is described as cellular phone software that will allow users to share digital content, including calendars, photo albums and music, and might be cloud-based.
For more:
- see this Reuters article
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