mSpot: Film fun by phone

Last week I fell in love on my lunch break. No, not with the cook in the cafeteria, but with mSpot Mobile Movies, a service that allows users to rent movies on their phone in the amount of time it takes to send calls to voicemail. Other services require you to download the media to your player -- which can take forever -- but mSpot operates on WiFi.

All you have to do is select a movie on m.mspot.com and pay $4.99 with your credit card (it's less if you belong to the Netflix-style Movie Club) and you can be watching "The First Wives Club" on QuickTime as I did at my desk. Those with more discerning taste should have a field day with more than 300 films from which to choose, including such flashback flicks as "Sixteen Candles" and more recent releases such as "Star Trek."

Phone calls and texts still come in while a movie is playing. Since the service is based on WiFi, mSpot doesn't work on planes, nor does it work when you're out of network -- but that protects users from roaming fees. Movies can be paused, rewound and fast-forwarded. And if you have a new iPhone, watching a movie won't completely drain your battery. The best part: The movie automatically returns itself.

--Alexandra Le Tellier

Photo courtesy mSpot.