Originally Posted by
blinginbunni:
“Is the lobster phone good? I was thinking about getting it but before i get it i want to know what tv channels it gets and if it has a good signal?
”
I've only just got mine (on Saturday), so don't really know yet. I didn't get it for the TV, I wanted it for the largish screen (320 x 240) for occasional www or wap access, Windows mobile 5.0, mp3 player and DAB radio.
Also, I've got it on Pay As You Go. With PAYG, you get the TV feature for 3 months, after which its £5 per month. With contracts, TV access is included for the life of the contract. Once my 3 months runs out, I'll not bother with the TV part. DAB radio is free forever, and BBC1 will be free until approx September.
It picks up BBC1, C4, E4, ITN News & ITV1, plus 30 odd dab radio stations. From what I've read on other sites, the C4 is not as normal C4, but is a mobile device version). You can either listen to the Lobster via the earphones or via a speaker in the phone, but either way you still need to plug the earphones in, as they act as the aerial, which is a bit inconvenient.
My house has a steel frame, which affects my normal freeview TV reception at home, so I need to mount my indoor TV aerial carefully, to work properly. I had no such problems with the TV reception through the Lobster. It scanned and picked up the 5 TV channels and 30 odd radio stations straight away. It seems to have picked national radio stations (I wanted it mainly for BBC Radio 5-live, without the reception problems of medium wave), plus some London based ones, plus local ones (in my case, Sheffield/South Yorkshire), which is good. I've only watched the TV Stations for a few minutes, to check that they worked. They were OK for me, but when I read some on-line reviews, it was clear that some other people had poorer reception..
In summary, I think the TV feature is limited, particularly if it doesn't take off and get more channels. But even so, I think the phone is great value for money, as it has dab radio, mp3 player, 1.3 mp camera.
The phone cost me £100, plus a couple of pounds postage, from the virgin mobile web site. It came with £5 of calls on the sim card, plus £30 of future call vouchers, ie a total of £35. (When I first looked this phone up on the website, a few weeks ago, there appeared to be some restrictions with these £30 vouchers, ie that you had £5 allowance per month, for each of the first 6 months, with no option of transferring any of the unused airtime to the next month, but when they actually arrived there was no sign of any restrictions, they appear to be normal top up vouchers.
Another nice feature, when I ordered it online, was that I could specify a particular day for delivery (mon to sat inclusive), and specify am or pm. So I was able to specify that it should arrive on Saturday morning. It did.