Video while you talk

Mobile phone company Orange recently displayed a prototype video- capable mobile phone at London's Live '98 technology exhibition. It uses a proprietary image compres- sion system developed at Strathclyde University, that can send 12 frames per second over 9.6 kilobit-per-sec- ond networks. Also in the exhibition was Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. It also demonstrated a rival system that uses MPEG-4, the agreed compression standard for very-Iow- data-rate-video for mobile phones. MPEG-4 is designed to cut the data rate by identifying a stationary back- ground from moving objects and compressing them separately.