You can surf the web with your iPhone, you can take payments with your iPhone, you can make music, drive a car, and even fart with your iPhone, but to date one of the few things you haven’t been able do is watch television on your iPhone.
Alright, fine, Japan’s been rocking a 1seg TV tuner for their Softbank iPhones for over two years now, and CES 2010 has already netted us a few new promising DTV-compatible toys, but FLO TV and their new partner are looking at making the whole mobile television proposition much more pocketable.
Last time we saw FLO TV trying to work with an iPhone, it came in the form of a bulky receiver that plugged into the phone’s dock connector. They’ve certainly come a long way since then, and their new partnership with iPhone accessory giant mophie is proof – in a recent announcement, they’ve outed a series of mophie’s Juice Packs with integrated FLO TV receivers for both the iPhone and iPod Touch. The units themselves are set to be released during the first half of 2010, but the bigger question here is if anyone will actually buy the thing. The Juice Pack itself is a solid accessory, but given the low adoption rate FLO TV (nee MediaFLO) has dealt with for the past two years, sticking a subscription-based receiver that only offers a handful of channels into a case doesn’t seem like the greatest idea either company has ever had.
Anyway, if you’re one of the few who have been clamoring for television on your iPhone since day one, you won’t have much longer to wait. Pricing for the cases has yet to be determined, but let’s face it – if you were really that adamant about FLO TV, you were probably going to buy the damn thing no matter what anyway.