MobiTV, from MobiTV Inc., www.mobitv.com, gives people a way to watch television on their cellphones.

For lovers of portable video, the arguments in favor of TV on phones are speed and convenience. Rather than waiting to download movies, video podcasts and TV shows to a computer and then to transfer them to a portable player like an iPod, some would rather see current, live content streamed onto the device they already carry — their cellphone — whenever they want, wherever they are.

Live TV on cellphones isn’t new. We first tested it in 2004. But it was awful then, choppy and almost unviewable, because the cellular networks were too slow and the phones were too wimpy. So I decided to try it again.

Many cellphones are capable of displaying streamed television using built-in services, but few people are aware of these capabilities and not every phone will work as well as the next. The best results are delivered on devices with good quality screens that can retrieve and display the content using high-speed networks.

I used a mobile content-streaming service called MobiTV on three phones serviced by two carriers, Sprint Nextel Corp. and AT&T Inc.’s Cingular Wireless, watching a variety of shows on screens smaller than the palm of my hand. Monthly usage for watching cellphone TV with these two carriers costs about $25 and $30, respectively, on top of your voice plan. MobiTV is compatible with more than 150 handsets, offering roughly 40 channels — about half of which show live content like that found on your home TV.

All in all, MobiTV offers a fun and simple solution for people seeking TV on the run. High-quality images appeared on screen just moments after I opened the MobiTV application and an on-screen guide labeled each channel. TLC, ESPN, The Discovery Channel, The Oxygen Network and major news channels are entertaining enough. And though my eyes hurt after 30 minutes of watching such a small screen, I only ran into a few other snafus: on-screen images disappearing while audio continued, certain channels cutting out and lips moving out of sync with audio. In more cases than not, these instances were rare or corrected themselves in seconds.

Other carriers offer video clips that might easily be confused with MobiTV Inc.’s technology. Verizon Wireless, for example, offers its V Cast service. But V Cast requires that you download clips onto your device. Sprint and Cingular also offer video-on-demand options. But the MobiTV service streams content onto your phone, showing it just about a minute later than the same content on live TV.

If you don’t use Sprint or Cingular and you’d like to download MobiTV to your standard cellphone, or to your Palm or Windows Mobile smart phone, you can do so through third-party vendors like Handango.com; these options can be found on www.mobitv.com. Vendors charge about $10 a month on top of any data charges that you might owe your carrier.

MobiTV’s service includes a channel guide.

Sprint and Cingular encourage you to buy an unlimited monthly data plan in addition to your voice plan if you’ll be watching TV on your cellphone. Sprint calls its live-TV service Sprint TV Live — though it’s really MobiTV beneath the covers — and offers TV-inclusive data plans for $15, $20 or $25. These return 8, 13 and 25 channels respectively. Sprint’s exclusive content includes the NFL network. To further confuse matters, you can also buy stand-alone Sprint TV Live on top of those three data plans; it costs about $10 monthly. Cingular charges users about $20 for its unlimited data plan plus $10 for MobiTV usage. This carrier keeps the MobiTV name.

MobiTV worked relatively the same way on all three handsets with both carriers: two Windows Mobile devices, the Sprint PPC-6700 and Cingular 8525, and a basic cellphone, Samsung Electronics Co.’s SGH-A707 with Cingular’s 3G network. In my tests, MobiTV came pre-loaded on the devices, letting me simply select it from a list to start watching streaming content.

On the Cingular 8525, a smart phone running the Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system, I browsed through a guide until I found The Oxygen Network. The Isaac Mizrahi Show, not a favorite of mine, was just ending. It was followed by a quirky game show called “Can You Tell?”

MobiTV streams two types of programs: Live and Made for Mobile. Live shows are like those on your regular TV though slightly delayed and with different commercials in the local ad slots. I watched MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews” using MobiTV and my regular TV, and an interview with Mia Farrow started about a minute earlier on my TV than it did on my mobile device.

Made for Mobile channels include special MobiTV content, such as music-video channels, or content for certain channels that MobiTV stitches together to show in a better format for mobile. The latter is the case with ESPN; in 15 minutes, I watched clips about football, Nascar, baseball, boxing and basketball with only a few quick commercials. In these snippets, however, lips weren’t synched with the audio.

I often opted to view content in full-screen mode, which, in 10 seconds, alters the image to take over the whole screen in horizontal view. A few times, while watching full-screen view, my on-screen content froze and had to restart in the regular view.

MobiTV says that using its service to watch programs saps battery at a rate equal to that of voice calls.

People who use digital video recorders at home to pause or rewind live TV will be disappointed to find you can’t do that with MobiTV. The company is hoping to offer these capabilities in the future. But because of the smaller screen, you probably won’t want to watch your mobile screen for as long as you would a regular TV, reducing the need to pause and rewind.

MobiTV’s services will never replace your home-entertainment center experience. But the ability to watch TV on your phone is a great way to stay plugged into news and entertainment. Just be sure that you’re using a fast network and a generously sized screen.

– Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

AT&T Inc. introduced Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry 8800 last week as a sort of grown-up version of the BlackBerry Pearl, released in September. The Pearl marked the hippest thing to come out of RIM, a slender model that used a pearl-like white trackball for navigation instead of the classic side scroll wheel. But devoted BlackBerry users admired its style only from afar, scoffing at its squished keyboard and smaller screen.

The BlackBerry 8800, $300 with a two-year AT&T contract, uses a trackball for navigation.

The 8800, which costs $300 with a two-year AT&T contract, meshes the newer Pearl features with the traditional traits of older, if duller, BlackBerrys. These improvements are well-done overall, producing the thinnest BlackBerry with the longest-lasting battery. Email menus were comfortingly familiar, and its phone worked well. I even surprised myself by adjusting to and liking the 8800’s most glaring change: its use of a trackball instead of a side scroll wheel.

But this device’s keyboard, a highly important feature, left me frustrated no matter how many emails I typed. Unlike the Pearl’s reduced keyboard, this one is full-size, with the traditional BlackBerry layout. But its keys are packed in, side-by-side, rather than spaced out. Instead of using essentially flat keys like those on older BlackBerrys, each key on the 8800 has a slight, distinguishing ridge that I found annoyingly restrictive; my thumbs had to be in exactly the right positions to type well. Keys on the older keyboards can be tapped from any direction or angle.

The BlackBerry 8800 is striking, with a bright screen and dark-blue coloring that looks closer to black. I dropped it by accident several times, and it seemed sturdy — a good sign for a device that will be used often. Shiny silver markings accent its sides, top edge and main navigational buttons. Its shape is a neat, thin rectangle, a welcome change from the bulgingly wide older devices. Even friends who don’t use BlackBerrys commented on its attractiveness when I pulled it out.

Setting up personal email accounts to work with the 8800 was easy on www.Cingular.com/BlackBerryStart or right on the device itself: I needed only to enter my Cingular account log-in and password, along with my personal email addresses and passwords. Personal email plans, including Web browsing, start at $30 a month, not including a voice contact; similar corporate accounts start at $45 monthly.

The trackball is better for navigating than the scroll wheel for a couple of reasons. Its location beneath the screen and above the keyboard makes it more accessible than the side-hugging scroll wheel, enabling navigation within an email as you type without moving your thumbs too far. The trackball also lets you move up or down and left to right, without having to press any other buttons to do the latter. This comes in handy when composing an email: If you make a mistake, you can simply scroll back or forward in a line; older BlackBerrys required holding the Alt key while using the scroll wheel.

But it took my thumbs quite a bit of retraining to be convinced of the trackball’s benefits. I was more familiar with my BlackBerry’s scroll wheel, and at first I kept touching the top right edge of the 8800 to find this and the Back button (volume buttons are positioned there instead).

In place of the traditional Escape button, which is below the scroll wheel on older BlackBerrys, an Escape button to the right of the trackball performs the same functions. A Menu key to the left of the trackball opened detailed options. The trackball can be pressed, too, to make selections.

I read and sent many emails on my corporate and personal accounts. Incoming emails were signaled with the device’s blinking red light — some things, thankfully, never change. But I just couldn’t get used to the keyboard. RIM claims that the 8800 keyboard’s keys are slightly wider than those of its predecessor, the 8700, but each key’s shape and raised ledge made it hard to use accurately. It takes time to adjust to any mobile keyboard, but this one seemed especially difficult.

The Web browser wasn’t bad, though it’s hampered by the fact that this new BlackBerry runs on AT&T’s pokey EDGE network, which is only one-seventh as fast as the speediest networks available. I found the 8800 easy to hold against my ear for phone calls due to its narrower width and slimmer thickness.

Media can be dragged and dropped onto your BlackBerry’s 64 megabytes of built-in memory or memory card (not included) using Media Manager, a program that comes with the device’s software. If you prefer taking your memory card out to load content, you’ll have a tougher time. I had to slide off the BlackBerry’s back panel, open a small metal flap and pull the microSD from its position. I did this a few different times and had a lot of trouble getting this card back in, making me hesitant to use it often.

Loading and transferring the actual data onto the 8800 worked without a hitch. I played Norah Jones tunes loud and clear on the relatively good speaker, watched a video on the screen and passed the BlackBerry around to show friends digital photos of me trying on a bridesmaid’s dress. I zoomed in on and rotated these photos using the trackball.

I wish the BlackBerry 8800 had a built-in camera and easy-access memory-card slot, two features that digitally savvy consumers will want to use often. The hip Pearl includes a built-in camera, but its memory-card slot is buried in an even more inconvenient place: beneath the battery.

A GPS system from TeleNav Inc. comes loaded on the 8800. When it worked, I saw detailed maps of my location. But it failed twice while driving along two different highways, saying that the GPS wasn’t able to pick up a clear signal.

Overall, the BlackBerry 8800 is a handsome device that looks good and functions well, as long as you rely on it for reading more and responding less. The keyboard has a steeper learning curve than the trackball — a useful new addition that you’ll learn quickly, forgetting the scroll wheel.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

Everybody wants to be your cellphone company. It’s not just the traditional carriers, like Cingular or Verizon Wireless, that aim to provide wireless phone service. New brands, like ESPN and Helio, are entering the cellphone market. These new entrants don’t have to invest billions in building nationwide networks. They simply rent large chunks of capacity on existing networks, mainly Sprint’s, and then resell voice minutes and other features to consumers under their own brands, complete with their own phones, their own billing and their own customer service. They are called Mobile Virtual Network Operators, or MVNOs.

Disney Mobile offers a $59.99 Pantech cellphone (far left) and a $109.99 LG Electronics cellphone (middle) for use with its Family Center programs, which help parents keep tabs on their children’s cellphone usage. The Family Locator feature (above) uses GPS to locate children.

The latest MVNO is Walt Disney Co., which believes it can leverage its famous brand, and carve out a niche, with a “family friendly” cellphone company called Disney Mobile. The idea is to sell phones and services that make it easy for families to stay in touch while giving parents easy control over their kids’ cellphone activities.

These Disney cellphones allow parents to limit how many minutes their kids can use, with whom they are talking and when they use their cellphones. A parent can even learn where his or her child is using a GPS locator. Yet they do meet another need: giving kids a way to stay in touch with a phone that looks normal, even a little cool.

We’ve been testing Disney Mobile and, overall, we think it’s a smart idea. The phones were easy to operate without reading any directions, and restrictions can be set using the parent’s phone itself or the www.disneymobile.com Web site. We think it’s a good thing for parents to be able to set limits on kids’ cellphone privileges, and these phones offer a no-nonsense way of doing so.

But there are three big downsides to keep in mind. First, Disney Mobile is a cellphone company, not just a phone or a feature, so you have to switch your family from its current carrier and phones, or at least add one or more new contract and phone. Second, the company is new and small and offers just two phone models, not the dozens its rivals sell. Third, it runs on the Sprint network, so, if your Sprint coverage is poor, Disney Mobile won’t be a good choice.

This isn’t the first effort to make a restricted cellphone for kids. Over a year ago, we tested Firefly Mobile Inc.’s kid cellphones — tiny, glowing gadgets with only five buttons that were ideal for young kids who aren’t ready for cellphones with numeric keypads. The Disney Mobile phones are aimed at the next age group of “tweens” on up to teenagers, who would rather die than be caught using the odd-looking Firefly unit.

These phones are offered in two brands and prices: the $60 Pantech DM-P100 cellphone with a digital camera and the $110 LG Electronics DM-L200 phone with a digital camera and camcorder. (These prices require a two-year contract.) Both are flip phones with color screens and full numeric keypads, and they look and operate like regular cellphones. Disney-related themes like those from the movies “Cars” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” illustrate the navigational menus in each phone.

Voice and data plans can be purchased for individuals or families; family plans include two lines and additional lines can be added for $10 each. Plans range in monthly price from $40 to $250, but all include five free GPS “locates” per month. Neither phone can use Sprint’s latest, high-speed network for Web surfing and email. They are based on older technology.

Using the phones was easy. When you buy them — either from the Disney Mobile Web site, by calling 1-866-DISNEY2 or at kiosks in malls around the country — the phone’s owner is designated. A phone can be configured either as a parent’s phone or a child’s phone, even though they are physically identical. The parent’s cellphone has privileges and features that the child’s cellphone lacks.

A special Family Center menu within the phone offers four parental features: Family Locator, Family Monitor, Family Alert and Call Control. Another option within this menu called Shop Family will eventually offer various applications that compliment the Family Center programs; as of now these aren’t yet available.

We selected Family Locator on our parent phone (child phones can’t access this section), chose the name of the child whose phone we wanted to find and were asked for our four-digit PIN. In one test, after waiting for about 20 seconds while the screen read “Locating,” we received a message and map accurately finding our child-designated phone. It said the child’s phone was “Near [1707-1773] K St. NW, Washington, DC,” and said that was within 40 yards of the actual location.

But during other tests, Disney experienced problems with Sprint changing its network configuration, and we weren’t able to receive GPS information about our “child’s” cellphone. Disney fixed this after almost a whole day, but we wondered about parents who might have used the Family Locator during this outage, panicked to find their kids.

The Family Monitor section lets parents set allowances or view usage for each child’s voice, text, pictures and downloads. Parents can set allowances, see how much allowance a child has left in each section, and how much has already been used up. We noticed that the data for each updated whenever we closed and reopened the Family Monitor section.

The Family Alert section is filled with canned text messages that a parent or kid — each phone is set up accordingly — might send to one another. The parent’s quick alerts include “Can U get a ride?” and “Call me when U can,” while the child’s include “Can I hang out?” and the ever popular “What time is dinner?”

We easily sent these messages from one phone to the other by selecting them and hitting Send. The receiving phone got the incoming message, labeled as a “Family Alert!” so as to distinguish it from other messages. Unlimited intrafamily messaging is included in each plan.

All three of these sections can also be accessed on a computer at the www.disneymobile.com Web site, where you can see more details about each after entering log-in credentials and a PIN.

Call Control, the fourth section within Family Center, must be set up on the Web site. After you choose a phone, you can go through a simple chart to designate when your child can use his or her phone according to times and days of the week. Below this chart, a section lets you enter Always On numbers that the child can always call regardless of Call Control restrictions, such as 911 and numbers of relatives. Likewise, a section of Prohibited Numbers blocks all communication with certain numbers, including receiving or making calls and text messaging.

We restricted the child’s phone during certain times of the day, and when we tried to make a call from that cellphone during those times, it didn’t go through.

Disney Mobile is good news for parents who have had a hard time cracking the whip on cellphone usage and bad news for kids who sneak calls at all hours of the night or who run up their phone bills with text messaging. If you’re looking for a way to keep better tabs on your family’s cellphone usage, this system works well.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

The cellphone — or, more accurately, the device formerly known as the cellphone — is getting to be more and more like a little portable computer. High-end models, known as smartphones, can handle large volumes of email, complete with attachments; surf the Web at high speed; view and edit Microsoft Office documents; take decent pictures; and play back music and videos.

To manage these laptop-like tasks, they come equipped with faster and faster processors; more and more internal memory; expansion slots for increasingly spacious memory cards; and small, but usable, keyboards, instead of mere phone keypads.

We’ve been testing two new such phones. One, from Palm Inc., is an improved model of the Treo, which has long been our favorite smartphone. The other, an entirely new design from Motorola Inc., manages to pack most of the Treo’s functionality into a much thinner and lighter body, at half the Treo’s price.

The new Palm model, called the Treo 700p, uses the Palm operating system and is being sold by both Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. for $399, with a service contract. The Motorola challenger, called the Q, uses Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system and is being sold by Verizon for $199, with a service contract.

Palm’s Treo 700p, priced at $399 with a service contract (left); Motorola’s Q, priced at $199 with a service contract (right)

The Q is the bigger news here. In the tradition of Motorola’s RAZR phone, the Q is a sleek, handsome devil. It demolishes the two biggest problems with smartphones like the Treo: They are bulky and expensive. The Q is a little wider than the Treo 700p, but it’s just half as thick and, at 4.06 ounces, is more than one-third lighter.

Unfortunately, its Microsoft software is much clumsier than the Treo’s Palm software, degrading its utility. Also, the Q’s screen is lower-resolution than the Treo’s and slightly smaller, and its battery life as a phone is weaker than the Treo’s. While the Q keyboard is larger than the Treo’s, we actually found it worse for typing.

Still, the Q is a decent solution for light email users and for those who have avoided a smartphone due to bulk and cost. We assume that, at $199, the Q will sell well and will challenge the Treo and BlackBerry in the marketplace.

However, we still prefer the Treo for serious users of mobile email, Web and Office. And the new model, with greater speed and other enhancements, only adds to the Treo’s strengths.

Both of these phones run on the new, broadband-like EV-DO data networks offered by Verizon and Sprint, so they are actually practical for Web browsing and for downloading big email attachments. In our tests, both registered speeds of between 200 and 500 kilobits per second, compared with about 70 kbps for the older Sprint and Verizon networks. Neither phone has Wi-Fi wireless capability.

The new Treo 700p is essentially the same as the Treo 700w introduced a few months back, except that the “p” model uses the Palm operating system, while the “w” model uses Windows software. Like the 700w, the newest model has a squarer shape than that of the older Treo 650. It also has bigger, better keys than the 650, roughly twice the usable internal memory and a higher-resolution 1.3-megapixel camera.

Also, the 700p now has — built into its memory — the excellent Documents To Go program from DataViz, which allows you to view, and in some cases edit, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and Adobe PDF documents.

The main advantage of the 700p, however, is its ability to use the high-speed EV-DO network. And the new Treo can be used as a modem for a laptop, either via a USB cable or a wireless Bluetooth connection.

In our tests, over a couple of weeks, the Treo 700p performed well. Web browsing was a pleasure at the new high speeds. Our only complaint was a short but annoying lag in displaying the text of emails and in performing certain other operations. Also, our test unit crashed twice and had to be restarted. (It didn’t lose any data in the crash.)

The Q is a mixed bag. Its hardware is elegant. Its software is annoying, often requiring two clicks to do what takes one on the Palm.

Motorola chose a more stripped-down version of Windows Mobile software than the one used on previous keyboard phones, and it does work better one-handed. But it still requires many of the extra steps of its Windows sibling and yet lacks the touch screen and built-in Office programs of other Windows-based smartphones.

In our tests, we found the Q easy to carry, but often irritating to use. Things like muting the phone, locking the keyboard and even playing the built-in solitaire game took much more effort than performing the same tasks on the Treo.

The Q has four navigation buttons positioned below the screen like the Treo; like a BlackBerry, it has a scroll wheel and back button on the right edge. The Q’s keyboard has more space between each key than most smartphones, but the rounded shape of the keys themselves makes them uncomfortable to use for more than a few sentences of email.

The familiar green Send and red End keys are prominently located just above the keyboard, and number keys are distinguished in black. We chatted away using the Q’s phone, and it worked well on voice calls.

Special designated Back and Home keys are next to the Send and End keys, and two other buttons enable direct access to email and the Q’s digital camera.

We set up email accounts on the Q using EarthLink and Hotmail.com, but Windows Mobile software really started to get annoying while we were navigating through our email. Performing a task as simple as deleting a message requires two steps — selecting Menu, then selecting Delete — and we couldn’t find any way to highlight and delete a group of emails.

By contrast, on the Treo, using the major email programs, you can delete an email with one click and even clean out a whole inbox with a couple of clicks. This may not matter much to people who get little email, but for heavy users, it’s crucial.

We also had trouble with attachments on the Q. While we successfully received some pictures and documents, a test series of four emails, each with a different type of document attached, failed on the Q. On both of our test Q units, using two different email services, the four attachments simply disappeared, even though they came through fine on the Treo and on Windows and Macintosh computers.

Viewing Microsoft Office and PDF files on the Q is a more cumbersome process than on the Treo, and the files can’t be edited on the Q.

The 320×240 resolution on the Q’s screen is 25% lower than that of the Treo 700p, which has a 320×320-resolution screen. Many things — Web sites, photos, attachments — just didn’t look as good on the Q compared side-by-side with the Treo. The Q’s built-in 1.3-megapixel digital camera captured videos and still shots without a problem, but the view on our screen was cluttered by information bars at the top and bottom.

You might like the $199 Motorola Q because of its price tag or striking design. If you don’t use email too much, or if you’ve never used another smartphone, you might not miss the more user-friendly features that the Treo 700p has to offer. We wish that the sleekness of the Motorola Q could be combined with the intuitive features of the Treo 700p. For now, we’ll stick with what works best — the newest Treo.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

But Apple is strangely unenthusiastic about it. Apple’s heavily trafficked Web home page relegated the new phone to a small box underneath a giant photo touting its newest music player, the iPod nano. By contrast, the Motorola and Cingular home pages were dominated by the new music phone.

The Motorola ROKR E1, $249.99 with two-year Cingular contract, www.motorola.com

After a week or so of testing the ROKR, along with a couple of competing music phones, my assistant Katie Boehret and I share Apple’s indifference. As a music player, the Motorola ROKR is OK, as are the two other music phones we tested. But none of them approaches either the style or the functionality of the iPod, and none lives up to the full potential of what a combined cellphone and music player could be.

These phones are based on the premise that music lovers would rather carry one combined device — the cellphone that’s with them all the time anyway — than a separate phone and music player. But, after testing the ROKR and its competitors, Katie isn’t giving up her pink iPod mini for them, and I’m still carrying my new, black iPod nano.

Many cellphones can play music. But the ROKR belongs to a new class of phone that claims to be especially good at it and to be able to easily copy songs from a personal computer.

Besides the $250 ROKR (officially the ROKR E1), the other two music phones we tested were the $499 Sony Ericsson W800 Walkman cellphone and the $150 (before $50 rebate) LG VX8100 from Verizon Wireless. All three play music via earbuds or built-in speakers. None of the three allows you to buy full songs (as opposed to ringtones) from an online downloading service like Apple’s iTunes Music Store.

You can tell that the ROKR is no iPod just by looking at it. It’s a thick, stubby candy-bar phone, far more conventional than Motorola’s super-slender RAZR phone. The ROKR also lacks an iPod-like scroll wheel for navigating music, instead relying on a tiny joystick that isn’t nearly as effective.

The ROKR’s main advantage is that it can synchronize music with Apple’s well-regarded iTunes software running on either a Windows or Macintosh computer. In fact, this phone is the first device other than an iPod that is recognized by iTunes when it is plugged into a computer via a USB cable. That’s a huge deal, because millions of people use iTunes all the time and are familiar with how to use it to transfer music to an iPod. By contrast, linking most other phones with computers is hard.

Sony Ericsson W800 Walkman, $499, www.sonyericsson.com

The ROKR’s second big advantage is that its music-playback software mimics the user interface and screen display of the iPod, which is already well known to millions of devoted users. You just push a “music” button on the phone, decorated with the green iTunes music-note logo, and up pops software that resembles an iPod.

But the ROKR has one huge disadvantage: It can hold only 100 songs, no matter how much memory you add to it. This is a contrived limit that applies regardless of how little storage space the songs occupy. While the companies won’t officially explain the limit, it was almost certainly imposed by Apple to keep the phone from cutting too deeply into iPod sales.

Getting those songs onto the ROKR was simple. iTunes asked us to name our phone, just like you can name your iPod, and we check-marked a box to allow iTunes to automatically choose the songs to be transferred. If you’d rather manually select your songs, you can do that instead.

But once the song transfer started, Katie and I were both stunned by how long it took — Katie’s 100-song transfer finished in just less than one hour, and mine took 64 minutes. Transferring that many songs on an iPod takes only about three minutes, so this was really annoying. Motorola explained that one reason for the slow transfer speed is that the phone uses the older, slower version of USB called 1.1 instead of the newer, faster USB 2.0.

Once our songs were finally transferred onto the ROKR, accessing and listening to them was a familiar process. But the hardware controls on the ROKR were considerably less well designed. The phone lacks standard “transport controls” — play, pause, forward and reverse buttons. Every move must be controlled by that teeny joystick.

Just like on an iPod, various data show on the phone’s screen while a song is playing, including the album art, artist, album name, track title and duration.

The ROKR has built-in speakers on the left and right sides of its screen, and its sound quality was pretty good, but nothing spectacular. A set of included stereo earbuds with a microphone on the cord let us listen to music and receive incoming calls without a problem. When we answered calls, songs were automatically paused and a prompt to resume the song appeared on-screen after the call ended. The ROKR comes with a 512-megabyte TransFlash memory card, but this large amount of memory doesn’t change the number of iTunes songs — it’s still 100.

LG VX8100, $99.99 with $50 rebate and two-year Verizon contract, www.verizonwireless.com

Sony Ericsson’s $499 W800 Walkman cellphone is very attractive. Its edges are colored orange, and each side is white. Lying face-down, the phone looks like a fairly thin digital camera. The W800, like the ROKR, comes with a 512-megabyte memory card. And, unlike with the ROKR, you can fill it with as many songs as possible. A two-gigabyte MemoryStick card would expand the phone’s song library to 500.

The Walkman uses the speedy 2.0 version of USB to transfer songs from a Mac or Windows PC, and the difference is shocking. Each song took about 10 seconds to transfer to the phone; the ROKR took around a full minute per song.

We used Sony’s included software called Disc2Phone to move music onto the phone from our computer. It was rather basic, but nowhere near as intuitive as iTunes. The software was divided into three panes — one showed the music on our computer, a middle pane was used for dragging and dropping songs that we wanted to transfer to the phone, and the far-right pane showed us the music that we had already loaded onto the phone.

Back on the W800 itself, a center button opens the Walkman (music) functions. It was pretty easy to skip through songs on the W800, and the phone uses a menu similar to that of iTunes to organize its music. This home menu listed Now Playing, Artists, Tracks, Playlists and Videos. Katie easily made a playlist on the phone itself by checking boxes next to songs and naming the list. The W800 also uses a tiny joystick for skipping ahead and back through songs (moving the stick right or left).

The Walkman phone’s speakers didn’t sound as loud as the ROKR’s, though they sounded like slightly better quality. A play/pause button is on the left of the phone, and volume can be adjusted on the right side. A good-quality stereo headset with a microphone comes with the W800.

The LG VX8100 from Verizon Wireless is more of a regular cellphone — at least compared with the Motorola ROKR and Sony Ericsson W800. It doesn’t come with a memory card or special stereo headset, but then again, it costs only about $100 after rebate with a two-year contract.

No special software is included for transferring songs to the VX8100 from your computer; instead, you’ll have to use a SecureDigital card reader and buy a MiniSD card to fit into the phone. There is no limit to the number of songs the phone will hold, other than its storage capacity.

To get music onto this phone, you have to remove the memory card, put it into an adapter, and then plug that into the memory-card slot of a Windows PC or a Mac. You then have to find your music folder and drag the files into a folder on the card. It took us several tries to get this seemingly simple process to work. First, a new Dell PC refused to read the memory card in the adapter. Then, an HP appeared to do so, and then failed. Finally, it worked.

This LG phone was the only one of the three to include a full set of hardware transport controls — play/pause and seek buttons. And its speakers were the best of the bunch, producing loud but clean and undistorted sound.

But its user interface was simply abysmal, by far the worst in this bunch. There’s no obvious button on the phone’s keypad to start the music player — you must close the phone and press the Play/Pause button to summon the music player. Finding the player on the phone’s menus was a chore. There’s no menu item for “music player” or anything similar. You have to select “My MP3″ from a menu otherwise devoted to Verizon’s “Get It Now” service for buying online downloads. And the music player’s screen used more space to show a pulsating graphic than for song information — only the song’s file name appeared on the screen.

Overall, the Motorola ROKR is nothing to write home about, and neither are its rivals. If you’re desperate to have some songs on your cellphone, be our guest. But a smarter plan would be to wait for a better combo device. These aren’t the phones that will replace your iPod.

With reporting by Katherine Boehret

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com

If you’re unfamiliar with using a numerical keypad to enter text (lucky you), spelling out a simple word like “dance,” for example, would require pressing 3, 2, 66, 222, 33. Typing out full sentences using this method is even more annoying, leading users to get creative with abbreviations and short-spellings. “R u goin 2 b l8?” is text-speak for “Are you going to be late?”

Phone makers have tried to solve this problem by squeezing little keyboards into the bodies of some phones. But these keyboards usually make phones bigger and bulkier than normal, and often show up only on costlier models, like the Treo or BlackBerry.

This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I tested a new phone that attempts to solve the text-entry problem in a novel way that doesn’t involve typing, and can be used on a small, inexpensive phone with just a numerical keypad. This new phone lets you dictate your text messages by just speaking into the phone.

The Samsung p207, $79.99 with a two-year contract from Cingular Wireless, has built-in “speech-to-text” technology: It turns what you say into text on the screen. This technology, called VoiceMode, was created by a small Massachusetts company called VoiceSignal Technologies Inc. If it works properly, VoiceMode should make composing a text message as simple as dictating a voice-mail message.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well. In our tests, the system made so many errors requiring tedious corrections that it might have been faster for us to peck out our messages the old-fashioned way — especially if we used the abbreviations and shorthand phrases so common among text-messaging fans.

The p207 is a handsome all-black flip phone with a built-in camera that, outwardly, betrays no sign of its special capability. To set up VoiceMode for the first time, you must teach your phone the acoustics of your speaking style. This requires reading 122 words out loud as they appear on the phone’s screen, and Katie did this in a few minutes.

Once the phone was trained for her voice, Katie set its text-messaging system to use VoiceMode by default; manual typing is still an option, you need only switch modes to type letter by letter again. The p207 also comes with VSuite, a more common technology from VoiceSignal that’s found in some 60 cellphones. It allows users to speak commands like “Call Walt,” instead of scrolling through menus to find phone numbers.

A special button on the phone activates VSuite and the voice commands. Katie simply pressed that button and said, “Send text, Walt Mossberg,” and she got to a blank screen for entering her text message, already addressed to me, since my phone number had been plucked from the phone’s address book.

Then, to dictate messages into the text screen using VoiceMode, you hold down the camera button on the side of the phone, which acts like a walkie-talkie switch. As you dictate, VoiceMode requires you to speak in a slow, unnatural manner, pausing after each word so the system can distinguish one word from the next.

The phone was trained to Katie’s voice, so she started off, speaking a rather simple sentence: “Hi (pause) period (pause) I (pause) am (pause) testing (pause) a (pause) new (pause) phone (pause) period.” But VoiceMode flunked even this easy test. It typed: “Hi. I am having a mail file.”

Once you release the walkie-talkie button, VoiceMode automatically corrects the words that it thinks were wrongly interpreted. While this helped during some of our tests, it usually didn’t correct sentences entirely. For Katie’s first test sentence, none of the words were auto-corrected.

The Samsung p207, $79.99 with a two-year contract from Cingular Wireless, has built-in technology from VoiceSignal Technologies Inc. that lets you dictate text messages. For more info: www.cingularwireless.com or www.voicesignal.com.

You can also edit words yourself, which Katie did by scrolling through her message, highlighting entire words and pressing the “0″ key, which pulled up a list of five words that she might have said, instead of what appeared on the screen. For example, Katie found “testing” on the list when she scrolled over “having” and selected it to make the change. This list also offers an option to spell out the word if you don’t see it on the list, by entering it the old-fashioned way one letter at a time. The whole process can be agonizingly slow if VoiceMode misses badly on the first try.

I had similar results when I tried my best teenager imitation. I said, “Hi. This is so cool. I’ll show it to you when we meet at the mall.” The phone wrote, “Hi. This is Saul cool. I’ll show it to you when we made at the walls.” To be fair, I hadn’t trained the phone for my voice, so it had a harder time recognizing what I was saying.

VoiceSignal says that the phone is constantly adapting, so as you go through the message and edit incorrectly detected words, it remembers those changes for the future. And indeed, the system did get better at recognizing some words the more we used it. But it was inconsistent, and messages still required significant editing.

The company says its dictionary holds “many tens of thousands of words,” including slang abbreviations and so-called emoticons — those little smiling or frowning faces created using punctuation. We tested that claim by saying “laughing out loud” into the phone; “LOL” — a common text message and e-mail abbreviation — appeared on screen. Speaking the words “smiley face” produced a “:-)” after three false results (”analysis,” “minimizing” and “violated”).

In addition to the frustrating inaccuracies of VoiceMode, there are other problems with speaking your text messages out loud. One of the benefits of sending a text message is that it can be done in sly silence, during boring meetings or classes. But dictation makes that impossible. It also makes your message public to anyone within earshot.

And unlike phone calls, text messaging doesn’t require a quiet environment; noisy bars and concerts are fine places to type text messages. But attempting to use voice-recognition technology in such environments might drive you crazy.

While VoiceMode has good intentions and did learn certain words as we used it more, we still found ourselves spending too much time editing our messages. This is one of those technologies that looks better on paper than it does in the real world.

With reporting by Katherine Boehret

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com