Consortium aims to put HDMI connection in every smartphone

Correction: Connected Planet inaccurately reported that the MHL would use the HDMI standard to transmit media from phone to home entertainment systems. While the MHL will use the HDMI port on TVs and other devices, the specification used is MHL's own. The story and headline have been changed to reflect this.

HDMI ports are becoming the hot item on the highest-end phones, allowing the amateur videographer and photographers out there to turn their pricey smartphones into multimedia consoles for their HD TVs. But if the Mobile High-Definition Link Consortium has its say, that kind of functionality won’t be limited to the high-end devices. It will become a common feature in any feature or smartphone.

The biggest restriction to HDMI in the handset today is the proper port, said Tim Wong, president of the MHL Consortium. HDMI requires not only a dedicated 19-pin dock in a device that is already fairly short on real estate, but embedded hardware to encode and decode the HDMI signal. From there, connecting the device to a home entertainment system or monitor requires only an HDMI cable, but even then the device isn’t a plug-n-play as you might expect. Video drains power, especially when the phone’s graphics chip and processor are doing the pixel crunching, and unless the phone is plugged into a power source, that long-form movie might become a preview, Wong said.

The Consortium-- which is made up of many of the big dogs in the consumer electronics industry, including Nokia (NYSE:NOK), Samsung, Sony (NYSE:SNE) and Toshiba—proposes that the mobile industry use the resources already available on the handset, rather shoehorn HDMI into the phone. Specifically, MHL is targeting the mini-USB port that has become the standardized power and data port and most smartphones. A cable with USB on one end and an HDMI plug on the other supplies the connection hardware in both the TV and the handset use MHL's technology to transfer media.

MHL technology will reproduce 1080p video and digital audio and allow the device to act as another multimedia component in a home entertainment system, just like a DVD player or home theater receiver. But the Consortium is building other bells and whistles into the specification. It’s taking advantage of the power transfer capabilities to allow the TV to charge the device. It’s also allows the phone to map the interface capabilities of the TV or multimedia device its connected to on the phone, turning it into a remote control, Wong said.

MHL is just getting off the ground, announcing its first supported device at Mobile World Congress last month, the Samsung Galaxy S with a Silicon Image MHL chip. Considering the line-up of vendors behind the Consortium, Wong expects many more devices with MHL capabilities to emerge in the coming year.

Despite its simplicity, there does seem to be a big glaring fault in the MHL spec. In a wireless world why depend on something as passé as dedicated cable? Wong couldn’t agree more. He said that the MHL spec isn’t tied to a HDMI or USB connection--they're merely the most common plugs for MHL's interface agnostic technology. MHL could be used to connect phones to TVs wirelessly in the future. The problem is most home entertainment devices today don’t have WiFi or other wireless networking technology embedded. Until the consumer electronics industry catches up with the smartphone, a cable will have to suffice, Wong said.