Virgin Mobile is first out of the starting blocks with real broadcast TV to your mobile with its exclusive Lobster 700TV. Inevitably Virgin Mobile has coined the word ‘tellyphone’ though this only covers part of the deal, as TV is coupled with DAB digital radio.

TrustedReview made a review of this device and here are some of their conclusions. What’s doubly interesting about the Lobster 700TV is that it is a Windows Mobile Smartphone – Virgin Mobile’s first. Now, my initial thought in this respect is that there was a conflict here. Live TV is a consumer focussed offering, while Windows Mobile Smartphones are aimed more at professional users or at consumers who are keen on keeping a handle on their lives with Outlook PC sync.

As already noted, this is a HTC made device, and usually that company does a good job when it comes to build, but here things feel a little less solid than usual. The casing looks like the plastic it is, and the numberpad buttons, while nice and large, have a lot of movement in them, almost as though they might come off.

Bluetooth is built in but is neither infrared nor Wi-Fi (the latter is still rare for Windows Mobile Smartphones). The handset is Tri-band GSM, and there is a 1.3 megapixel camera on the back with neither flash nor self portrait mirror to give its low megapixel count a lift. HTC could easily have made the large silver surround for the lens double as a self portrait mirror but chose instead to inlay grooves into most of it.

Nonetheless, with the handset reporting 71MB of available storage out of the box, if you have any intention playing digital music through Windows Media Player you are going to want to add memory.

The expansion medium selected is microSD cards. Regular readers will know I am not the greatest fan of this format because it is so very tiny. I’m doubly irritated in the case of the Lobster 700TV to find that the slot is not only under the battery but also under your SIM card. Yep, you need to power down, take the battery out and take you SIM out to swap cards. What on Earth is HTC thinking of, designing a memory expansion system like this when end users are likely to want to hot swap cards to get music in and out of their handset?

Still I guess what you really want to know about is the TV and DAB radio capabilities and performance. The service comes courtesy of BT Movio. TV-wise you get BBC1, ITV1, Channel 4 and E4. But note: Channel 4 is just showing its Short Cuts service, a made for mobile TV channel, and the BBC service is available only on a 12 month trial basis. Some American, film and sports content will be missing according to BT’s announcement of its Movio service.

The conclusion is that the guys at trustedreviews are in two minds about the Lobster 700TV. Yes, it has all the capabilities of a Windows Mobile Smartphone, with TV and DAB radio thrown in. But the number of TV stations it handles is small – which is why they’ve given it such a low value rating – and you can’t really see yourself wanting to squint at its screen for long. Surely nobody is that addicted to TV that they can’t video something to watch later on a bigger screen?

Read full review on trustedreview.