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LOL! A couple drawbacks compared to what? Now that we've read exerpts from Sprint Fantasyland up there, here's some real world observations and comparisons:
1)
Sling (and others): The inputs make little or no difference. Analog, digital, whatever, unless you didn't connect anything to the slingbox, they all look exactly the same on a 2 1/2 inch screen. My experience has been that they all look almost exactly the same on a full sized laptop, too.
Sprint TV: Doesn't work.
2)
Sling (and others): Most of these things allow you to control a cable box or use an internal tuner. So you either rent your own cable box (which works) for about the same cost per month as Sprint TV (which doesn't work) or you use the internal tuner on those occasions when a conflict arises. I think that happened twice, then I got my own cable box and it never happened again. I could have just hooked up the cable to the internal tuner, but I can afford the $8 a month for my own box. This also has the advantage of letting you see what someone is watching or changing the channel for someone if they want to watch something and can't remember the channel. Great for messing with parents and loved ones from across the room, house, country and world.
Sprint TV: Doesn't work.
3)
Sling (and others): Personal experience is that, at best, it takes a fraction of my home bandwidth. Sling worked over T-Mobile's EDGE network which could suck up about 1/5th of my total home bandwidth on the very best of days and it was totally watchable. It's simple to limit the bandwidth used by Sling and other streaming sources should it ever become a concern and, again, on a 2 1/2 inch screen, you can limit it drastically and not notice much of a difference, if any at all. Slide open the keyboard of a Mogul and count the seconds it takes for the screen to rotate. Do you think it's capable of using all your high speed bandwidth?
Sprint TV: Doesn't work.
That aside, I've seen the Touch in action and I'd figure Sprint TV has worked about 1/3 of the time on that device. Most of the time it either doesn't do anything at all, it displays a 7001 error (or something like that...7002, whatever..."channel not ready") or it displays an error about failed authentication. When it does work, it takes quite a bit of time to actually get video on the screen, several seconds to over a minute, and it has a dead man's switch. That is, it pesters you fairly often to press the button to keep watching and kills the stream if you don't press it. The video I've seen is nothing to write home about, too and reminds me of Sling via an EDGE connection more than EVDO.
Alternatives? I use a combination of Slingplayer and Orb. Slingplayer has playback problems but it's watchable and the control UI is top notch and never fails for me. Orb can get a stream going with TCPMP which can get you smooth video back, but the UI totally blows and it can't do anything with my cable box. But between the two of them, it works. If HTC/Sprint fixed DirectDraw or Sling fixed their player, all you'd need is Slingplayer. And it's not terrible, it's just not smooth and sometimes drops to 1 fps or worse. It's funny how obviously lesser phones like the 6700 and the T-Mobile MDA blow away the Mogul and Touch when it comes to DirectDraw video.
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