Lobster 700TV Mobile Phone

The Pluses...

The Lobster 700TV is the only phone I know of that includes a DAB radio, other phones have FM radios, not a super digital DAB radio. This alone makes this 'now being discontinued' phone a classic. The screen is fantastic, 320x240 @ 65536.. is great for media playback, get lonely cat games divx player and a 2GB Micro MMC card, and enjoy as a great media player. The mono sound out of it's built in speaker is actually quite clear. The interface and response of the phone appears quite quick. The camera is about as good as you can expect at this price point, 1.3Megapix, but is probably a cut above many as it doesn't seem to suffer from too much grain in low light. Although it has many options, including video, it works best as a simple, fully automatic, quick snap camera (bit like the old 110 cameras used to be) No Flash though, so no night shots.

The DAB radio is fantastic, even works on my train journey into London, with only minor glitches in a couple of tunnels. (ie better than FM radio's tend to perform on the same trip). As for the phone, well I'm quite new to Smartphones/Windows Mobile. But what you will find is there is a phenomenal amount of support out there for these phones (also known as the HTC Monet). For example, I wanted to use the phone with a A2DP Bluetooth stereo head-set, which it nativly didn't support. Not a problem, found somone who had got it working and installed their .CAB file, and now I have A2DP support. This is the same kind of 'flexibility' that made PC's the ubiquitus device they now appear to be.

This phone is only sold on the Virgin network in the UK. On pay and go, I think they are selling for £49 at the moment. Add the £30 credit required for Virgin to send you the unlock code so you can use any sim, and this WM2005 QVGA DAB TV phone which can take a 2GB Micro MMC card is ready to go with any network you like for £79 brand new. This looks like a good deal, and it is.


The minuses...

This great phone is also able to show TV, but that is limited to a few channels, which other than BBC1 will cost you £5.00 a month and will not be supported much longer. To be honest it's not that great to watch either, it's quite jerky and at an obviously reduced frame rate. Also, the head phones use a 'custom' connector which includes the DAB antena. It's best to get someone to modify this for you to make a standard 3.5" converter. So you can use you own choice of higher quality phones. This phone is only sold on the Virgin network in the UK.

Summary...

Buy it, before you can't. It's a classic phone in the making. If only a few more providers had supported it, and it's TV standard it would probably have spawned a revolution. Add WiFi and change to a standard headphone connector and it would have been perfect. I paid less than £50 for my Lobster 700TV and I'm sure they can be had cheaper. Which considering what you get out of the box is a real steal.

Absoloutly amazing little phone this is :)
Windows Mobile based operating system with all the familiar little windows applications included to use on your mobile :)

Includes Active Sync for synchronizing your emails, contacts, multimedia and much more

Windows media player to play and organize your music and films on your device

Internet explorer so you can use your device to view wap and www based sites :)

The TV function is amazing too - experience 5 freeview channels plus all the DAB radio stations :) Good quality Pictures and sound as long as you've got reception!

Before I bought this I owned the Sony-Ericsson W810i and I though nothing could touch it.... but I was wrong! I love the Lobster and wouldnt trade it for anything.

I dont think theres much this handset cant do :)

I bought it primarily for the DAB and Freeview TV. Although this ends in October as far as Im aware (Virgin decided to ditch the service)

Luckily there are tons of other features on the phone, so even when the TV service comes to an end, there is still plenty of reasons to hang on to this phone.

How many other Windows based Smartphones can you buy brand new for less than £50?????!!! Id guess NONE!

Havent tried the sat nav add-on yet... but yes.. this phone is a sat-nav waiting to go as long as you've got your hands on the GPS device thingy that goes with it.... WOW

A Pda, a phone, a sat nav, the internet, an MP3 player, a Movie player ALL IN ONE

AND FOR LESS THAN £50

A BARGAIN

Believe me

Scott
________________
OCTOBER 2007
Just to add to this. I have had a GPS device for about 2 months now, with tom tom mobile installed to my handset!
You need a good GPS receiver ideally, the cheap ones struggle for signal from my experience.
Installed my TTMobile onto it, was a little tricky to get it up and running but I managed to sus it out, linked it using bluetooth to the GPS receiver and hay presto! Tom tom on my Lobster. Identical looking to what you would have on a regular sat nav, with the same options as far as I can see, so the lobster really is amazing! I love it and wont get rid of it for a while yet!
Scott

What's that coming over the hill? Is it a Lobster....

This is quite a bulky phone compared to most offerings these days but has a very large, clear screen. The DAB radio function is great but I have never used the TV side of things.
The windows mobile interface takes a lot of getting used to (i'm a ex-sony ericson man)and I always seem to leave applications running in the background and find that I have to use task manager to stop them all as the phone grinds to a halt.

The buttons are not the fastest to text with and I constantly find myself deleting things due to mistakes.

Apart from that, the phone has never crashed on me, the diary function is a god-send, using an external GPRS receiver it can be used to run TomTom 5.2 software...

IF you don't mind the size of it then this is a good phone. If you are looking for discreet and tiny, steer clear!

Virgin have announced that the TV function for this phone will be discontinued , and have stopped selling Lobster 700TV's on their website.

see links:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07..._mobile_video/
http://knowyourmobile.com/blog/3285/virgin_pulls_the_plug_on_mobile_tv.html

Considering it is one of the main features of this phone I think people should be made aware of this before buying!

Still a good phone for it's other features though! email, dab radio etc. if you don't mind its size.

Very underated, great phone, reliable, never misses a beat. Get one, it needs to be expirenced......................................

For an all in one mobile this one really is handy. An mp3 player, camera, TV ( with five channels) DAB radio, oh and it is a mobile phone...
The keyboard is easy to use and the pocket windows is a real benefit for docking and keeping your diary up to date. The speaker phone volume is good and the hands free headset although fiddly is functional...
A good all round buy!

Before I start, DO NOT BUY THIS PHONE FOR THE TV FUNCTION. Although you can still use it to view film and clips over WAP its unique selling point of free BTmovio access has been discontinued. Also the phone was an exclusive virgin mobile product and as such is locked to virgin sim cards, by default. Virgin will unlock it for you but only if you buy £30 credit first, (which you can use if you already have a virgin mobile kicking about) so factor this price into your bid limit.
However, if, like me, you want a phone with DAB radio then this is a phone to consider. the reception is dependant on your regional DAB reception and requires the earphones to be plugged in to function. This can be a bit annoying as the phone has a smaller jack than normal so if you already have favourite earphones then you'll have to invest in a converter.
I like the design of this product, it is chunky, which although not to everyone's taste, I find quite appealing. the buttons are wide but short, so I imagine some people may miss vertical keys often.
The Windows driven GUI is familiar but slightly counter intuitive. the phone can sync with a few windows applications (like outlook and windows media player) but the choice is limited. One big advantage to this phone is the size and quality of the display. Obviously optimised for TV display it is nonetheless very nice for reviewing the pictures you take with the 1.3 megapixel camera.
all in all an ok phone if want something a bit cool, and a great phone if you want DAB radio.

Overall, the Lobster’s size has been put to good use as far as the control buttons are concerned, with large number pad buttons, and for a Windows Mobile Smartphone, relatively huge Home, Back, Call and End buttons. The softmenu buttons are thin and long, but I didn’t find them a problem to use. The Navigation button is rather nicely shaped with three square corners and one rounded one and again it is large. Sitting alongside the 3, 6 and 9 keys are markings that indicate you can use these keys to move up and down channels, pause and move between TV and DAB radio.

I have been very impressed with the lobster TV, Its actually a HTC Monet badged with Virgins own brand. In my opinion one of the best WM5 Smartphones.

Pros,
Very well built, possibly the toughest windows mobile on the market, all my kids have them, and many of their friends, so far only one has been trashed after a year and you should see the state of it, its been dropped many many times, eventually the kid dropped it with the charger plugged in and ripped the USB connector off the board.. hardly the phones fault. I cant see any other smartphone taking this level of abuse..

Large community of developers and users happy to help (spv-developers, xda-developers and many more)

Installing software is easy and there is a huge selection of applications available on the web for almost any application you can think of from calculators to journey trackers, Google maps to a Planetarium (Leos void)

There is a great free media player (TCPMP) which plays almost all formats including mpeg, divx, xvid, mp3, ogg, flac along with many others.
I make divx movies for the kids (320x240, 150kbps video- 112kbps audio using max noise reduction and insane quality works out at under 100mb/hour) with a 2gig card you can fit around 20 hours of surprisingly good quality video on it awesome for those long journeys. It only struggles on the most demanding full screen (4:3) clips, wide screen (16:9) it never drops a frame at 25fps

Virgin will unlock it for any network for £15.

It has the largest memory in its class with 64mb ram and 128mb flash (over 60mb free) so all your applications can be installed in phone memory leaving your memory card free for maps and media. Unlike devices like the spv-c600 which leave you with under 15mb. Its also running the latest version of WM5 available so already has push email and runs far better than my c600 with the latest (but older) rom.

It happily runs tomtom (with a bluetooth GPS)

It has a DAB radio so you can listen to all those digital radio stations (you must use the original headset though as the antenna is built into the 5th contact, I chopped off the rather poor ear pieces and fitted a socket so quality phones can be used) although standard c600 and c500 adapters will work but DAB reception suffers. It has a great program guide (EPG) the only down side is you get a slight glitch at the begining of each program as the epg updates

Great battery life as it uses the power frugal omap750 210mhz CPU, hours of video, and spares are cheap. It uses the same battery as spv-c500, spv-c600 and clones.

With a little tweaking as an advanced user there is almost no aspect of the phone that cant be customized from the menu layouts and icons to making the TV/radio button start the mp3 player or tomtom instead

Conns
Not many..

Its a bit big and ugly but if it was smaller it wouldn't be so tough, the screen is surrounded by a lot of plastic so its well protected... ever seen one on eBay with a broken screen??

The TV function no longer works, this isn't a fault of the phone. The service was provided by BT over the DAB radio service but was withdrawn Jan 2008 due to lack of interest, It was good, far better than TV over the Internet.

No infrared..

It has a 1.3mp camera which isn't so hot next to some of the more modern phones but its better than nothing and supports video recording.

No stereo bluetooth. Although this can be enabled and will work with mp3s there isn't enough CPU power to play ogg's or use DAB

I bought the phone out of curiosity and as I needed a spare smartphone to use alongside my nokia. The attraction was a proven OS (WM5) and my liking for the HTC phones I have had in the past. The TV and DAB radio option was an added bonus, as is the availablity of lots of software.

On initial use, the setup was simple and I was able to syncronise and input my data virtually out of the box. It also accepted lots of software I have for previous devices. I put a Virgin Pay as you go sim in and registered the phone and sim with Virgin. I think the available tarifs are excellent, and the first three months of TV are free with a £5 per month charge after that if you want to continue with it.

I was able to tune in the TV and Radio quickly, although using the earphones as the aerial is a little awkward. I found that the output of the limited TV channels available to be acceptable, but as I see its use to view news rather than many programs I believe that this is a reasonable compromise. As I have little need for music on the device, I have not bothered to download music or other content to it, and so, cannot really speak for the wider media use of the device.

The DAB radio output is ok, but you can easily lose the signal when mobile. I do a lot of driving and using the DAB radio on the move through the headset is ok, but fiddly if you have to retune all of the time.

I have setup both IMAP and POP email on the phone and chose to setup to collect mail twice a day, at times convenient to me. It works effectively and allows you to download headers only and only receive the urgent emails that you need to deal with.

PUSH EMAIL is available for this device, but as I do not have access to my Company Server (this is not a corporate device) I trialed a freeware version, but quickly discarded it as being to complicated for my relatively simple needs.

I have installed a 2gb micro storage device, which allows me to carry a fair amount of work or reference data on the device. The lack of Mobile Office software on WM5 means that I rely on third party applications to view files and documents. Editing documents is possible using the wonderful Documents to Go package widely available on the internet.

As a mobile device and phone I have found it to be acceptable, the lack of available cases is an issue, but I have pressed an old Blackberry holster into service which has proven useable. Battery life is acceptable and the phone's coverage is fine in UK as Virgin uses the 02 network, it means that there are very few areas that it is out of signal.

I believe that the device is good at what it does, it has supplanted an ageing blackberry 7100 v and a nokia device as my main phone, with calls to other sims being forwarded to the Virgin Number. I also no longer carry a PDA.

I have found the Virgin Lobster 700TV to be a good reliable smartphone, which makes the most of the WM5 OS and can be expanded and extended using third party apps to make it a useable tool, while not the 'wonder device' that I am still looking for.

I cannot recommend it to everyone, but it meets my day to day needs

Love the TV going to order one it will come handy when traveling. Also its a smartphone so thats even better.

When you decide to sell your Xperia X1 because you are really feeling the financial pinch, it's time to get something as cheap as possible that isnt as usless as it first appears.
I stumbled across this little gem by accident while searching here on Ebay.
Now, in some ways, the Lobster 700TV falls way behind the likes of the Xperia and Touch HD. For example the Lobster 700TV has:
*No WI-FI.
*No VGA screen.
*No EDGE,3G or HSDPA.
*No touch screen.
*Only takes a max of 2GB micro SD.
*Only 1.3 MP camera.
------------------HOWEVER-----------------
Dispite these short falls, and the handset being made some three years ago has one very interesting feature that no other handset has...DAB digital radio and TV.
This will allow you to pick up the following band frequencies:
*UK
*Korea
*Canada
*L Band
*Band III
***********PLEASE NOTE THAT ALTHOUGH YOU CAN STILL GET DAB RADIO, THE TV OPTION IS NO LONGER BEING BROADCAST***********
So be aware if you decide to buy this handset, you can no longer get TV on it, but you can still get Free Radio even if you have no sim card!!

The Lobster is a Tri-Band phone and runs on Window Mobile 5.0 ! so you can install a lot of programs writen for windows mobile.
Battery life is excellent.
It comes with a 2.5mm headphone socket so if you want to use your own headphones you will need a 2.5 to 3.5 heaphone adapter, otherwise there are some basic headphones included in the box.

*************PLEASE NOTE, YO WILL NEED A 4 POLE ADAPTER IF YOU WANT THE RADIO, OTHERWISE THE 3 POLE WILL WORK FINE JUST FOR LISTENING TO MP3's ETC**********************

The sound quality through my own headphones, is amazing and crystal clear!!!

Radio can be listened through the loudspeaker as well as through the headphones.
It has bluetooth for file transfer.

Overall for the price (I paid £35 *yes I said £35* for the handset *NEW* still sealed with the security tape still intact. It was the ultimate bargin.

**************IN CLOSING, THIS HANDSET IS LOCKED TO VIRGIN ONLY, BUT THEY WILL UNLOCK IT FOR A £15 CHARGE TO ALL NETWORKS************************

This phone has so many great features that make it worthwhile even without the TV. Shame, the TV is no longer available, but the phone is still great!

I bought one when Virgin were doing special offer - with rewards cost me £10 + £3 p&p.

I put in a 1Gb card and installed TomTom Mobile - this together with sat nav bluetooth receiver works just fine in both UK and Europe.

TV worked fine during free period but is now restricted.

Not a good phone for texting.

Mobile tv a great concept BUT with Virgin/BT discontinuing service in Jan 2008 it wont be around much longer meaning main 'feature' of this phone will be gone. :-(. See http://www.dtg.org.uk/news/news.php?id=2589

the unlock code dosn't work, no refound has been given, bad communication ,avoid scam.hope that person will not sell any more at ebay.

had two orders now one came broken one never turned up , ebay need to tuffen up a lot....................................................................................................................................................................

A truely unique phone, whilst slightly clunky and old fashioned it has powers none can rival! An original in the 'smart phone' market it originally had digital TV and radio - sadly due to lack of uptake on the TV the TV option is no longer available but the digital Radio reciever makes this phone one of the smallest and cheapest portable digital radios on the market - and the radio works with out a sim card!

With a sim and a memory card the phone is also a mini PC, camera, video recorder and voice recorder, oh and MP3 player!

so for a VERY cheap option to have all that in a sturdy, robust phone - it can't be beaten.

As far as I know only availabel on the Virgin network but at the time of this review the cost of internet was a flat 30p a day (on pay as you go) - the cheapest available....

THE PHONE IS A GREAT PRODUCT. WATCH TV FOR A PAYMENT ONCE A MONTH FOR FIVE POUND. THE HANDSET IS A SOLID HANDSET AND LOOKS STYLISH. MY SON IS REALLY PLEASED BECAUSE WHEN HE IS OUT HE NEVER MISSES HIS PROGRAM, SCREEN IS QUITE BIG AS WELL.

Does everything in a different order to other phones (weird predictive text) but poor basic features (eg doesn't have progressive ringing volume, lots of menues to set alarm, button on headset doesn't change radio channel just acceps calls). Slow 'Windows Mobile (AARRRGH!) means you miss the pic/videos (no sound on videos), AWFUL keypad, now no TV, battery less than 3hrs listening to radio (if your lucky enough to have a great dab signal)(witch you have to navigate out of to take a pic). Would sell mine if I thought it was worth it but who wold buy after such a review! Virgin (usually good) won't offer anything against upgrade.

I like the size of the phone. It is a very compact flip phone. will make a very good first phone for my son.

it was second hand and damaged this ebayer is a nasty piece of work very dishonest and i recommend he be kicked of ebay as i am not the only one he has conned.

The phone is in excellent condition, service was excellent. I m very pleased and assured that not everyone is trying to con the buying public