Spice Mobile Showcases Video Handset

It’s always great to hear of an Indian company coming up with something that the world finds attractive enough to spend money on. At the World Mobile Congress currently underway in beautiful Barcelona, our very own Spice Mobile showcased its latest handset, which comes with an Optical Disk Drive on the rear of the phone.

Source - Via Tech Digest

This mobile handset can play videos though using proprietary disks using blue laser technology and the H.264 standard. The disks slip into a tray that pops out from the rear of the phone. Think PSP. If the large 2.8 inch display is not good enough for you (and I don’t know why it wouldn’t be), it also has a TV out. The headphones socket do extra duty to suit that very purpose.

Image Source - VMedia

Users can currently view just one movie (2.5 hours) per disk, but given time I’m sure someone will figure out a way to increase that. At the moment there are about 40 titles available, all Bollywood of course, but that number is likely to multiply many times over in the coming months. The disks are available for about Rs 200 per title.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

Image Source - VMedia

Spice also launched an innovative handset designed specially for the blind. The keypad is equipped with Braille dots and a voice-guided system reads out the digits as they’re typed. It also calls out the numbers of incoming calls. That may not seem like much, but I still think it’s a brilliant concept. The phone is priced around Rs 800 ($20).

We don’t have details about the price of the video handset yet, or when it would be launched in India officially. So stay tuned.