The smart phone is here, who needs a TV? If you listen to the hype surrounding these wonderful machines you could actually remove the TV from the hotel guestroom, thereby ensuring a fairly hefty saving. I played around the other day with some different smart phone applications. Put aside the feeble battery life of most smartphones, I sometimes wonder whether they are meant to be mobile or not. Also aside from the screen size, which had me looking for my glasses and left me with a headache after my various trials, these phones are actually quite amazing.

The first application I downloaded enabled me to watch the BBC world service live. Quite amazing! but after half an hour on the world’s latest disasters I was thirsting for some more mundane entertainment and so I downloaded the application enabling me to watch the top 20 channels of my PayTV provider. Again, pretty neat I thought, as I zapped between channels and watched some intellectually less challenging content. Having lost a couple of viewing points in each eye, I had to give up, switched on the TV to find that actually most of the channels were on there anyway. I tried again a few days later whilst abroad and there it suddenly struck me that due to license issues most of the content wasn’t available where I was. When I finally did find appropriate content that worked the 3G network, it was obviously under pressure and I had to put up with constant buffering. When I got home I also noticed that there was no buffering on the phone bill- nice to see that the Telecom Operators are still able to generate high ROIs!

On my next trip I had learnt my lesson and decided to connect via WiFi to use my smart phone. Interestingly enough the hotel’s HSIA system wouldn’t allow this. My conclusion was that the TV still remains key in the guest room and that the SmartPhone WiFi access Acentic builds into its new HSIA solution, Horizon, will ensure that many guests won’t see their phone bill go through the roof.