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If you watch a lot of television and travel frequently, you probably often find yourself missing your favorite shows, or at least having to wait until you get home to catch up on them. The Slingbox (see top image) from Sling Media may be the cure to your problems.

This small device connects to both to your network and a cable box, satellite receiver, or DVR and allows you to view and control content that's been placeshifted from those devices almost anywhere you happen to be. There are actually three different Slingbox models to choose from—uner, AV, and Pro, depending on the equipment and type of inputs you want to use. We used a Slingbox AV paired with a TiVo Series 2 DVR. (You can read a review of the Slingbox AV here.)


Back of a Slingbox

In order to access a video source via the Slingbox, you must use client software called the SlingPlayer. It's available for Windows Vista/XP/2000 and Mac OS X (10.3 or higher), but you can also get it for some mobile platforms too. SlingPlayers for Windows Mobile Smartphones and Pocket PC are available now, and Palm and Symbian Series 60-based client are in the works as well. (If you live in the UK, you can get SlingPlayer Mobile pre-installed on a Nokia N73 today when you sign up for 3's X-Series package.)

To see how the Slingbox experience on a mobile device compared to that on a full-size PC, we put SlingPlayer Mobile for Windows Smartphone 1.0.5.41 through its paces on a T-Mobile Dash.

Video Quality
A mobile device has a host of limitations compared to a conventional computer, and one of these is relatively limited bandwidth. This brings us to how SlingPlayer Mobile's video stream looks and sounds, which will ultimately depend on how you're connecting to your Slingbox. Sling recommends that you use a 3G cellular or Wi-Fi connection for the best quality, and no matter how you access the Slingbox, a minimum of 256 kb/sec upstream bandwidth from your home network is recommended.

We found SlingPlayer Mobile's streaming quality to be more than acceptable when accessing it from a Wi-Fi hotspot. Although the resolution is necessarily low, the frame rate was such that the stream was easy to watch for long periods of time. There were times when the stream froze for several seconds or visibly dropped frames, but they were generally infrequent and didn't really detract from the viewing experience.

User Interface
Another obvious disadvantage of a mobile device is a small display. With the regular SlingPlayer, you get a separate window with an almost full-size image of your AV device's remote control, making interacting with your AV device a relatively simple matter.

Needless to say, you don't get that kind of real estate on a 240 x 240 smartphone screen, so a graphical remote is out of the question. In spite of that, controlling your Slingbox (or more accurately, the device it's connected to) with SlingPlayer Mobile isn't all that difficult once you get used to it. Some of the controls are straightforward—you can change channels using the numeric keypad, for example. The rest of the remote's functions (along with various SlingPlayer configuration options) are relegated to nested menus accessible through a soft key.

Even though these are generic-looking menus, they provide access to device specific functions, such as TiVo's "Now Playing" list. (You can download and print a two-page folding Pocket Guide that outlines all the major SlingPlayer Mobile functions.)

You can also navigate through your video device's on-screen menus using the phone's D-pad, though the response time can be a bit plodding—it usually took between 4-6 seconds for the command to register, and it almost always resulted in a momentary halt to the video stream.

We noticed that small text was difficult if not impossible to read in most circumstances, but if you switch to full-screen mode and devote 100 percent of your display pixels to the video stream, it improves the appearance of text (especially program guide data) and makes it very readable. (The catch is that you can't access the remote or menus until you toggle out of full-screen mode.)

It's worth noting that if you plan to make heavy use of SlingPlayer Mobile, you should plan on getting extra batteries or having your charger close at hand. As you might expect, running an application like SlingPlayer mobile for long periods of time can quickly suck a battery dry: we only got about two hours out of the Dash's fully-charged battery. Since most smartphones can't output much volume, a set of earbuds would also be a worthwhile investment.

Pricing
Although Sling permits free downloading of the conventional Windows/Mac SlingPlayer software, SlingPlayer Mobile is a separate purchase. You can download a 30-day evaluation version, but keeping the software after the trial period will set you back $29.99.

We're not crazy about the idea of having to pay extra for SlingPlayer Mobile, but we can understand it given the device testing necessary to support myriad devices from a host of vendors. (In any event a one-time charge of $30 fee beats having to pay a monthly subscription fee, and SlingMedia says that if you switch from a Windows Smartphone to a PocketPC device or vice-versa, you can call and have your registration transferred to the new device.)

Because we've seen the superior video quality, and program usability you get with the conventional SlingPlayer, we're not sure we'd want to rely exclusively on SlingPlayer Mobile to watch the Slingbox from the road. Nevertheless, it provides a good enough experience that it's worth considering, particularly for those that eschew traveling with a conventional notebook in favor of a smartphone or PDA.