Slingbox on 3G iPhone: Jumping the gun

By Erica Ogg on 09 June 2008, 12:55pm

Sling Media has plans to connect your Slingbox to Apple's 3G iPhone. But don't get too excited; there's no release date set yet.

Sling showed us a brief demonstration of what the company's mobile application, SlingPlayer, looks like on a jailbroken first-generation iPhone. It's merely a proof of concept, the company says, to demonstrate how superduperexcited it is to get started on an actual product.

This is, of course, all assuming that Steve Jobs announces the 3G iPhone today at the opening of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, which is all but assured at this point.

SlingPlayer is an application that allows users to stream video directly from a Slingbox to a mobile device. The bandwidth to show a high-quality video stream necessitates a device on a 3G network, which is why the company has had to wait for the next-gen version of the iPhone. Sling already makes the SlingPlayer Mobile available on Windows Mobile, Palm OS and Symbian phones, with RIM's BlackBerry on the way.

Sling's product manager for hardware, Ted Malone, says the company didn't consider making a Web application version of the SlingPlayer like Apple has encouraged other developers to do. Malone says SlingPlayer Mobile has to be a native application to meet Sling's standards of quality.

There's no date set, but Sling says it could be available by the end of this year. It's more likely to debut in early 2009. -Erica Ogg