Still, I had to ask myself as I squinted at the match on the Pocket PC: "I'm supposed to be excited about this?"

Reality bites. You can't enjoy mobile TV with lousy signal conditions.

Flip side

There is a flip side: The World Cup broadcasts underscored that mobile TV design engineers and device vendors have their work cut out for them¡ªand they know what they have to do.

Joost Verhoeks, international product marketing manager for TV-on-mobile at Philips Semiconductors, acknowledged the poor signal conditions around the stadium, but added, "You [also] need an optimized antenna that can tune better." He added, "Obviously, the coverage area needs to be learned better by broadcasters."

At the same time, the experience taught me that tuner sensitivity is crucial. If your mobile TV drops signals, forget anything else. You get nothing.

Well, that's not exactly accurate. The software in the Pocket PC system was smart enough to read out from memory when it dropped signals. In short, the screen didn't go dark because the system was designed to keep the last frame of the signal.

Yes, there were 14 TV channels available on my Pocket PC, but they were very slow to change. Largely because of poor signal conditions, it took more than ten seconds to change channels.

Theoretically for the DVB-H standard, using "one-time slice," means it should take five to ten seconds for a channel change, according to Verhoeks. The time, however, can be reduced significantly "if you take more time slices," he explained. The penalty is greater power consumption.

Another problem is ambient light. If you are trying to watch a live game in broad daylight, you see nothing. Most digital camera users are familiar with this when trying to see a still image displayed on the camera's small LCD.

What's the solution? "We are exploring adaptive backlighting," Verhoeks said. Philips' backlighting algorithms are already used in consumer LCD TVs to get "more brightness out of LCD while keeping power consumption down," he explained. "We have an FPGA working to explore the issue," he added.

A spokesman for 3 Italia, which began commercial DVB-H broadcasts in Italy in time for the World Cup, claimed its "outdoor" DVB-H mobile TV reaches 70 percent of Italian subscribers¡ªboth those in large cities and popular vacation destinations for Italians like the beach.

Back in Berlin, mobile TV reception was less than 10fps. Verhoeks of Philips asserted that picture improvement technologies used in home DTVs can be transferred to mobile TV.

Philips's "Natural Motion" algorithm¡ªessentially a line-doubling technology with an intelligent motion-estimation algorithm¡ªis being pitched to operators and mobile handset vendors to help increase frame rates on handset screens.

The problem is how to implement this on tiny, power-hungry handsets? Philips is exploring the possibility of running its algorithm either in an application processor in a handset or adding a separate chip closer to the phone display.

We'll see¡ªhopefully better than I saw in Berlin.