MobiTV offers a large range of attractive TV channels on your cell phone, but you'll have to be patient to enjoy them. The version I saw on two Cingular phones didn't quite provide the video quality you expect from TV in the age of HD.

MobiTV is a downloadable application sold for regular phones on Alltel, Cingular, Sprint, and U.S. Cellular, and for smartphones on all carriers. It's a streaming service, sending down video over the carrier's data network, so you need a high-speed 3G phone to get a decent experience. I tried the service with the LG CU500 and the Motorola V3xx phones on Cingular.

The service has the nicest channel lineup of any mainstream mobile TV provider, along with the best interface for selecting channels. (Of course, you could argue that Amp'd has an even better lineup, but only if you're in its college-student demographic.) Along with mobile news standbys FOX News and MSNBC, there's news from ABC and NBC, sports from ESPN and FOX, and Animal Planet, two C-SPAN channels, Discovery, Oxygen, TLC, The Weather Channel, a short-films channel, a channel entirely of movie trailers, seven (!) music video channels, a video-game reviews channel, two channels with cute women giving sports-betting tips, and more. All of MobiTV's channels are linear: In other words, they're 24-hour feeds even if they loop now and again.

The little clips of major TV shows provided by services like SmartVideo are missing, but really, I don't miss them much. There's plenty to watch here.

Within the MobiTV app, video fills the top two-thirds of your phone screen while a three-line slice of MobiTV's program guide fits below. There's no full-screen mode, and I wasn't thrilled by the video quality. Faces, especially, often had the blurriness you associate with very high levels of compression and low bit rates. In addition, the signal seemed to pause every 2 or 3 minutes for rebuffering. Some channels were jerky, and Oxygen, particularly, had problems with talk syncing with lip motion. And sometimes I had trouble even connecting to the service. For instance, my CU500 phone would periodically get stuck with the message "receiving signal." The bit-rate problems weren't caused by the phones' data connections, because I independently tested the V3xx and found it to be the fastest 3G phone I've ever used.

You navigate through MobiTV's 51 channels with a slick, well-done electronic program guide. It showed five channels at a time on my V3xx screen, with clear descriptions of each program. It only goes 2 hours into the future, though, and there's no way to set alerts for future programs you want to watch.

Cingular's MobiTV has the content to be a compelling mobile TV system, and I can truly say that there was always something I wanted to watch. But the delivery isn't anywhere near as smooth as it is on Verizon's new MediaFLO-based system, and given the speed of Cingular's HSDPA network, MobiTV could do better at delivering a truly TV-like experience.

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