So, I’m beginning to really look forward to a holiday too. Its booked for a couple of weeks time and I’ve not even contemplated anything I’ll need. I guess the mad rush around the stores on a Friday evening will have to happen. Sigh.

So, to at least get one thing right, I’ve been contemplating a holiday phone.

Having been stung for £200 for taking my normal mobile to Morocco – Two voicemails kept trying (and failing) to get through. It tried to call me up to three times an hour. Each one ended up counting as a connection (cost 25p) as it went to the Morocco server before going back to my voicemail and ultimately it was rather expensive.

Strangely, I’m no longer with Phone’s 4 U, the company that said – “Sorry, that’s the way it is.”

So, anyway, holiday mobile phones:

If you want a decent camera in the phone then there’s only one option. The Samsung G800. It has an optical zoom so it can actually take decent pictures.

An mp3 phone. There’s the iPhone, obviously. All of the Sony Walkman phones. And, well, just about any other. Many of them contain Wolfson audio chips so will sound as good as the iPod.

If you’re an exercise bunny, maybe the Samsung miCoach too.

But all of these are expensive. And, in reality, you want something cheap.

The Orange site lists three phones for under a tenner. Alcatel OT-E227, Nokia 1208 and Sagem my220x. They’re not exactly sexy. They are very much ‘Fisher Price does phones’. But, you’re not going to care if you lose them.

If you insert a local PAYG sim so you’re not paying international roaming rates when calling the local restaurant to book a table and you’re laughing.

The pair’s service will cover: the service platform, a security and encryption technology, the platform for encoding into a DVB-H compatible format, the satellite delivery to terrestrial infrastructure and the TV channels themselves.

There’s a lot of advantages in going for a hosted option – it takes a lot of the upfront costs out of the equation and means that you can test out the service without committing a load of cash. That said, it doesn’t leave much room for differentiating services across different operators, but at least it’s a relatively safe way of testing out DVB-H while the business models – not to mention the demand – for mobile TV are being sounded out.

The test looks like it’s just a small one without any consumers involved – according to the pair, the trial will take place in Dish’s labs from May to August with a view to finding out how well it performs and how much it costs.

The trial seems a little on the small side for anyone seriously thinking about getting into mobile TV any time soon. But if Dish really is just testing the water without a full scale rollout in mind, why did it buy a great big chunk of 700Mhz spectrum recently?