Get ready for a new multifunction phone paradigm. We already have PDA phones, MP3 phones, and camera phones, now MobiTV ($9.99 per month with select Sprint PCS Vision phones), a surprisingly effective, affordable, and appealing service from Idetic, gives us TV phones, a sleeper category available on only the Sprint PCS network. Although other non–calling functions on digital phones may leave you bored or unimpressed after your initial enthusiasm, this hot little application, even with its limited frame rate and channel selection, might turn out to be a bigger success than the other applications combined.

MobiTV is available strictly via the Download/Applications menu on a selection of Sanyo and Samsung Sprint PCS phones. Although you might expect the first phone TVs to be premium-priced units, some cost under $100. MobiTV is currently available for Sanyo SCP-5400, SCP-5500, SCP-7200, SCP-8100, RL2000, RL2500, and VM4500 models and Samsung SPH-A620 and VGA 1000 phones, with drivers and software coming soon for the Sanyo 5300, the Samsung SPH-A660 and VI660, and the LG 5350.

MobiTV offers ABC News Live, California Music Channel, CNBC, CNET, College Sports Television, Discovery Channel, Discovery en Espanol, Discovery Kids, Independent Music Network, MSNBC, The Learning Channel, and Toon World TV Classics, and Idetic is in negotiations with other channels. What you get is the same thing you'd see and hear on your television set (albeit delayed a few seconds while the phone's memory buffer fills)—not just video clips or selected content.

On our tests using a Samsung SPH-A620, MobiTV took approximately 20 seconds to load, connect, fill the buffer for the default channel (MSNBC), and start playing. When we switched channels, refilling the buffer with the new channel's content took about 6 seconds.

Video quality isn't as good as on your television set. In general, 15 frames per second (fps) is the minimum required for humans to perceive continuous motion, and 30 is the goal. Idetic currently aims for 1 fps, which may sound horrible, but it's not. The company wisely chose to favor audio quality over the image, because our brains are more forgiving of missing video than audio—choppy audio is a major turnoff, but stalled video still communicates. According to Idetic, the company could have sped up the video a bit, say to 3 or 4 fps, but not without intolerably degrading the image. Looking at a reasonable, slow moving image is certainly more pleasant than watching a faster fuzzy blur.

The bottom line is that MobiTV works—it certainly impressed us. Part of what makes the less-than-ultimate performance acceptable is the choice of content. You can still enjoy news, music video, sports, and to some degree even cartoons at less than 15 fps.

According to Idetic, some of the higher-end phones currently on the market, particularly those combined with PDAs, have CPUs and memory sufficient for much higher video performance, and many phones coming in 2004 will be powerful enough to attain 15 fps. Today the $9.99 monthly fee (which is in addition to the cost of your calling plan, but may be taken as part of a credit offered to some PCS Vision subscribers) is apparently enough to cover what could be unlimited television viewing at no extra charge on Sprint PCS phones. Whether that low service price will hold once the performance of typical phones reaches 15 fps remains to be seen, but Sprint PCS has no current plans to raise the price.

A year from now, live TV on digital phones may be commonplace as carriers compete to sign up channels and streaming video content providers, all the while promoting their respective network coverage and video capabilities. Sure, we'd like more frames per second and a wider selection of channels, but right now we're mightily impressed by this surprise application with its high-quality sound, decent images, and low monthly price, and we're even impressed by the fact that a digital phone with a tiny display can be such an effective tool for broadcast video.