Mobile ESPN (with Sanyo MVP)

CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
Detailed editors' rating
Design: 7.0
Features: 8.0
Performance: 8.0
Overall score: 7.7 (3.5 stars)
• Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 5 reviews
• See all user reviews

Product summary

CNET editors' review

• Reviewed by:
  Ben Patterson
• Edited by:
  Eliot Van Buskirk
• Reviewed on: 03/09/2006

Sports fanatics, fantasy aficionados, and on-the-go bookies will thrill to Mobile ESPN, the new MVNO from the all-sports cable network. Armed with the ability to pull down alerts and real-time scores for most major sporting events, along with dozens of daily videos, hundreds of news stories, and stats for literally thousands of major- and college-league teams and players, Mobile ESPN will delight die-hard sports fiends, although the clunky MVP handset--the only phone in ESPN's lineup so far--is the service's Achilles' heel (at least until new handsets arrive later in 2006).At $200, the bulky MVP is priced about the same as other MVNO multimedia phones, while monthly 3G service prices are par for the course, although a bit stingy with text messages. The flip-open handset is based on Sanyo's ugly duckling, the MM-9000, which is bigger and clunkier than a cutting-edge 2006 phone should be. While it boasts an impressive 262,000-color internal LCD, a 1.1-inch external LCD, a 1.3-megapixel camera, and a Mini SD slot, it lacks such high-end niceties as Bluetooth and an IrDA port. Mobile ESPN reps said that new handsets should be available by mid-2006.

Once you flip open the MVP and click the menu button, you'll find a grid of colorful, animated icons, some of which lead to typical functions (Web, Call History, Shop, and Settings), while the Mobile ESPN icon takes you directly to, well, mobile sports heaven. The Java-powered application takes several seconds to launch; indeed, the phone tries to entertain you with sports trivia and swirling "please wait"-type animations during the roughly 15-second delay. But once the app is up and running, you have access to the latest headlines with a lead photo; a thin, scrolling menu column (a.k.a. the sideline) that slides out from the left side of the screen; and the familiar but nonhyperlinked ESPN info ticker along the bottom. The sideline column lets you access all the sports goodness with ease. We found the general design to be a notch above the typical text-based content we've seen on other mobile apps; the copy is custom formatted and easy to read, with the ESPN-themed color schemes adding a layer of gloss.

Since Mobile ESPN is a 3G service, we jumped right to the videos. The clips are divided into a three-tab interface, with game highlights under the Highlights tab, breaking news under ESPNews, and analysis filed under The Take. All told, there are about 15 clips available at any given moment (about 40 to 50 clips are produced daily and pushed live at different times of the day, according to ESPN), each of which are thumbnailed into an image that's accompanied by a brief caption. We like that you can select multiple clips to download at the same time; they line up in a downloading queue, and you can watch one video while others are still downloading. Since sports fans obviously follow different teams, the service can automatically tailor your game highlights according to your favorites.

We liked having convenient access to ESPN's news and analysis videos (including snippets of Pardon the Interruption and SportsCenter), but they felt truncated, at only about a minute or so, and there's no hourly or even daily digest of top stories, the way there is with CNN To Go. Another gripe is that the player doesn't remember your preferred screen size; each time we watched a clip, we had to reselect the full-screen setting.

Ready for game time? Mobile ESPN does a great job of tracking your favorite teams and players on the field or the court. The phone lets you track past, in-progress, and upcoming NBA, college hoops, MLB, NHL, NFL, golf, soccer, and NCAAF games; you can just select a sport, navigate to a day, and choose a game. Then you can read a game summary in the case of already played games, check out a preview of an upcoming game, or--our favorite--track scores and stats in real time. You can check up-to-the-minute shot charts and scoring drives; box scores; and player stats (scores and stats in this window refresh at intervals of 30 seconds to 2 minutes).

To follow the action in literal real time, you can launch the Realtime window, which pops up with the score, the period, and the game clock. We tested the Realtime feature side by side against a live, televised NBA game, and Mobile ESPN's score and game clock were almost precisely in sync--pretty cool. Our only real complaint trackingwise is the omission of sports such as NASCAR and tennis, although we also wish real-time scores would appear on the external LCD when the phone is closed.

Mobile ESPN comes with a slick Alert feature, which you can customize for specific teams (NBA; NCAA football and basketball; NHL; MLB; and NFL) and scoring preference (by final score or by quarter), as well as breaking news for sports in general or specific events such as the Olympics. The alerts look surprisingly professional, complete with team logos, box scores, and top performers--much better than the text-only messages we expected.

If you're all about stats, dive into Mobile ESPN's exhaustive database of teams and players. You can drill down by sport (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, and college hoops and football) and team, then delve into schedules, general clubhouse info, rosters, transactions, and injury reports. Want to call up an individual player? Drill down a bit further for head shots, vital statistics, headlines, and season and game numbers. Fantasy players can go a step further by monitoring and managing their teams via the Mobile ESPN interface; just enter your ESPN fantasy username to see your current standings and tweak your roster. Sorry, Yahoo and CBS SportsLine fantasy players--your teams aren't compatible.

In addition to new handsets later in the year, we can expect a pair of new services, according to ESPN reps, in the coming months. ESPN Search will let you scour the service's archive of news stories and columns, as well as hunt down team and player statistics. ESPN Answer Man is a service that promises to return an answer to any sports-related question. ESPN reps also say that some sort of music downloading store is in the cards, although there's no word on details or timing.

Mobile ESPN runs on Sprint's high-speed EV-DO network; we found that pages loaded almost immediately, while video clips took about 30 seconds to download--not bad.

Pricing plans for Mobile ESPN range from $35 a month for 100 minutes to $225 for 4,000 minutes, a scale that stacks up well with competing monthly plans featuring 3G network access. No matter what plan you get, you can use Mobile ESPN as much as you want--except for the Alerts, which count as text messages (only 100 messages come bundled with each plan). As a comparison, Verizon's 450-minute V Cast plan costs $65 a month and includes 400 text messages. ESPN offers a bundle of 200 more messages for an extra $5 a month, or 500 messages for $8 a month, for those requiring more Alerts or text-messaging bandwidth.

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User reviews

• Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 5 reviews
• My rating: 0 stars Write review

• Showing 3 of 5 user reviewsSee all 5 user reviews

• 4.5 stars

  1 out of 1 people found this review helpful

  "Get a Mobile ESPN phone at a discount!"

  by brettestewart on July 24, 2006

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• 4.0 stars

  1 out of 1 people found this review helpful

  "Awesome Technology For The Sports Fan"

  by kingmangordon on May 26, 2006

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• 4.0 stars

  1 out of 1 people found this review helpful

  "Great phone and service although expensive"

  by 09zjordan on March 16, 2006

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Where to buy Mobile ESPN (with Sanyo MVP)

Please visit the developer's Web site Mobile ESPN.