Digital TV on a dongle hits the iPhone in Japan

The unassuming exterior hides a full-featured digital TV tuner.

Japan’s TV addicts now have the option to equip their smartphones with a dedicated digital tuner, the MonsterTV U1 dongle from SKNET.

When it comes to getting broadcast television on an iPhone, there’s no shortage of options, with the likes of Slingbox and Orb Live performing admirably.

But those options require an always-on Internet connection that’s not considered ideal. 

The ¥9,800 (US$120) USB dongle, which attaches to a computer at one end and an antenna at the other, comes with sophisticated-looking EPG (Electronic Programing) software (Windows only) for scheduling recordings.

Once shows have aired, the MonsterTV dongle encodes them into a format suitable for an iDevice and shuttles them across via iTunes.

The amount of compression is up to the user, but SKNET claims it can fit an hour of programming into just 240MB.

While using Apple’s notoriously clunky media manager to handle recordings is a little taxing, the concept of having ready access to favorite programs for that next commute makes it worth the bother.

And at least the app for watching the results is free.

The MonsterTV works only with the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad, so Android and BlackBerry users are out of luck this time.