Wirefly Blog Review: Sprint TV

With the new television season underway, Sprint TV has added the ability to watch new network shows including Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, CSI: NY and Numbers on Sprint TV. Always curious, the Wirefly team decided to test the service out and see how it worked.

Since I have a Motorola Red RAZR, one of the Sprint phones compatible with the service, and a data plan, I decided to watch the first episode of Numbers. The show is broken up into six segments – I assume what is normally between commercial breaks. Each segment buffers and begins playing. The sound quality was good – both through the speaker phone and my headphones. The screen refresh was occasionally a little rough and the image pixilated or split the screen. I wasn’t a big fan of loading each segment individually, although I realize that it’s necessary in order to optimize load times. I guess it’s better than sitting through a two-minute commercial break, in any case.

I also tested the continuous streaming content from CNN Mobile and the Weather Channel available from Sprint TV. The quality was fine and I didn’t have the same buffering issues that occurred during Numbers.

I thought the text in that type of content was too small to read on the RAZR screen, but on a bigger screen – like those found on the Palm Treo 755p and the HTC Mogul 6800 – I can’t imagine that being a problem.