Mobile TV

[Morph]

For those of you with a 3G Vodafone phone, you can now access mobile TV, with quite a good selection of sky based channels. Open your live! menu, go to entertainment, then go to mobile TV. Make sure your connection settings in your browser and real player are set to Vodafone live!. Best of all this is free until the end of January, then only £5 a month after that.

[Ben]

What a good service!

Some of the good points first. The integration with the web browser is good - Real launches automatically and when finished watching the channel you are returned back to the Live! page where you can go back and select other channels. The ability to play back in full screen is commendable, the quality is good, and the regular (and pathetic) sound and picture pauses seen in MobiTV are nowhere to be seen here. The product is extremely good, easy to access, and there's an excellent selection to watch.

On the flip-side, there was the usual Vodafone mixed-bag of errors and faults. I couldn't get Sky News to play at all, Real (and web) would just exit, but MTV, CNN, SkyOne and National Geographic were all good. I actually watched National Geographic for a good 15 minutes - I got so absorbed in the programme that I quite happily sat there totally unaware of the small screen or tinny sound. I also received messages once or twice saying the channel I wanted to watch was currently unavailable due to high demand.

This is a competent service that makes the MobiTV services look utterly rubbish by comparison. Once again it would seem that Vodafone, despite not having a dedicated application for the service, have stolen the quality crown as they did with music tracks - though perhaps at the expense of the usability one.

Vodafone 3G users should be feeling very pleased with themselves this evening.