Portable electronic devices of various kinds have the ability to make our lives much easier and allow us to accomplish much more while we're on the go. Mobile phones area great example of this. Not only do they allow us to keep in touch with each other, but they even allow us to keep track of phone numbers and addresses. And some of the more advanced ones can even allow us to send and receive email and surf the web. There's also the possibility that you can watch TV on some phones in some areas.

If you really want a lot of options when it comes to watching TV while on the move, the PocketDish might be just the device for you. The PocketDish is a portable video device that's produced by Dish Network. It has a color LCD screen a built in hard drive, can play music and display digital photos as well as play video, and can display photos and video on most full sized television screens. In many ways, the PocketDish is a lot like other portable video devices.

What sets the PocketDish apart from other portable video devices and makes it a very attractive option for watching television when you're away from home is the fact that it acquires the video that you watch on it by downloading that video from Dish Network digital video recorders. All you have to do is program your Dish Network digital video recorder to record the TV programs and movies that you want to watch while you're out of the house and then download them to the PocketDish. This is a much more efficient, more cost effective (the video is free this way), and much less frustrating option than downloading video from the Internet the way other portable video devices do.

There are actually three models in the PocketDish line. The smallest and least expensive model is the AV402E which features a two point two inch LCD screen and a 20 gigabyte hard drive. The hard drive can store up to 20 hours of downloaded Dish Network programming and numerous songs and digital photos.

The next larger model is the AV500E which has a four inch color LCD screen and a thirty gigabyte hard drive. The thirty gigabyte hard drive can hold thirty hours of Dish Network video.

The largest PocketDish is the AV700E. The AV700E has a seven inch LCD screen and a forty gigabyte hard drive which can store up to forty hours of video downloaded from Dish Network.

The AV500E and the AV700E have a number of traits in common like built in speakers, remote controls, and display stands, but the one that really sets them off from the AV402E and other portable video devices is their ability to digitally record video. Either model can be plugged into the video out jacks of almost any other video device and record video in real time. As an added bonus, video recorded this way is encoded in MPEG-4 format which means that it only takes up about a quarter of the space of the Dish Network video which is encoded in MPEG-2 format. That also means that you can pack a lot more video onto the PocketDishes' hard drives recording this way than you can by downloading it from Dish Network.

All of these features mean that PocketDishes provide a very convenient way to watch TV wherever you want.