It’s becoming increasingly harder to come up with an excuse not to catch up on your favorite TV Shows. Sprint is now offering their wireless customers the ability to watch full-length episodes of ABC programs the day after they air, right on your Sprint phone. Shows that are currently available include Greys Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty and Lost. I tried it out for myself on the Sprint Upstage. Each episode is divided up in to different segments, most probaly so that loading time isn’t too long. I pulled up an episode of Ugly Getty and tried loading the first episode. It only took about 5 seconds before the episode started playing. The quality was not incredible, and such a small screen isn’t comfortable to stare at for long periods of time, but it was pretty good experience overall. Also, audio quality is a bit shaky though when listening on the phone’s speakers. Still, I prefer watching a full length TV show, or a segment of a TV show, rather than the normal Sprint TV offerings which until now have been just short edited clips that last at most a few minutes.
So, overall, having the ability to watch TV – real TV on my phone is a lot of fun. That combined with Sprint’s Music Store and the ability to preview and download music to my phone, makes the Upstage a great multimedia device. Well, almost great – the device has a lot going for it, except that I find the touch sensitive controls to be too sensitive and it makes navigating the phone a kind of miserable experience. And that is a shame because for a such a small phone it brings a lot of entertainment with it.
