PhoneTalk

Late last week, Samsung announced its Media Hub service would be available shortly and indeed it has arrived. Just this weekend, the Samsung Epic 4G alerted me that it was ready to receive an update. So I plugged the cell phone into the wall (this is good practice when receiving large updates to smartphones) and let the Epic 4G do its thing. A few minutes later, the Media Hub app had content. About the content, there isn't a lot and the movies they were fairly old (for example, it has Transformers, but not Transformers 2), but it has a lot of classics like Top Gun and The Blues Brothers. There was also TV content, you could get episodes of South Park and the Hills. More content will inevitably roll out (the library is already more populated than it was this weekend) and according to the Samsung Media Hub announcement the content should be much more recent especially when it comes to TV shows. The good news is the UI is straightforward and easy to navigate. The main screen has 3 options My Media, Movies, and TV Shows. Once you select one of those categories the content is arranged by sub categories: Comedy, Action, Top 10, etc. for movie options and by network MTV, NBC, etc. for TV shows.

If you want to purchase content you'll need to set up an account, which takes just minutes to do and doesn't require more information than a zip code and e-mail address, which is a plus. Content prices range from about $9.99 to $12.99 to buy movies and $2.99 to rent movies, though not all movies are available for rental and TV shows costs $2.99 to own. You'll need to enter credit card information in order to purchase content, but you can save it so you don't have to enter it more than once. Additionally, there's also an option to Redeem a Card, which is likely a way to gift content.

How well Samsung Media Hub will do is hard to say. The prices are competitive, however, with other media content apps available such as BlockBuster and Netflix (currently on the iPhone) there's definitely plenty of competition available. That said, the mobile content market is still young and there's tons of room for growth. As far as consumers are concerned at this stage of the game, the more choice the better as long as its easy to use.

Topics: Phone Smarts Sprint Samsung Smart phones Video Android Apps