We sat down with the notebook wizards from ASUS this week, where they spilled the beans on a variety of extremely tasty notebooks and gear, including TV-ready netbooks.
ASUS tells us TV is being slated as an option for the 1-inch thick T91 tablet, which wowed us at CES with its touchscreen, sub-1Kg weight and LED screen.
While you can log onto various network TV sites for "catchup TV", or download your ...cough....illegal episodes via the Web, having a TV built into the notebook itself seems like a great next step for people who aren't prepared to go hunting, or if you'd rather the over the air version.
It's been possible to plug a PC card TV tuner into a laptop, it will be interesting to see how well the concept works built into the notebook itself, and whether issues with antennas and signal reception put a dampener on the whole notebook TV concept.
ASUS isn't the only one thinking about notebook TV. Intel has even announced the "world's first embedded balanced antenna for digital TV", designed so you don't need an external antenna. There's virtually no juicy details that we could find, bar this graphic from Intel.
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| Intel's Embedded Balanced Antenna for digital TV on a notebook |
The real answer to all could be DVB-H, which is designed to deliver digital TV over the air to our phones and mobile devices. While state of the art phones like Nokia's N96 have the DVB-H capability, you can't enjoy Today Tonight this way - services are not yet operating in Australia (a trial was recently undertaken in Sydney involving Nokia).
If you want to be really tricky, Web based options will let you get all sorts of TV feeds to your phone or notebook. The March 2009 issue of PC Authority magazine details how to set yourself up with Slingbox, media centre extenders, ABS's iView and other goodies.
Until DVB-H gets going though, the humble tuner card may still come in handy.