Initial impressions (visually)

First impressions are good. The case is good quality with easily accessible points though I’d be happier if the USB connection was at the rear of the device as opposed to the front (within the pull down flap). Those of us with PC’s acting as media machines could have a constant and hidden access.

The remote control is a breath of fresh air given the usual rubbish which comes with some freeview recievers. It’s large but it seems easy enough to use though the design doesn’t seem to meld itself with the black pvr.

In terms of size - the device is around the same size as a VHS player or one of the larger DVD players. It’s not sleek but it isn’t bulky either.

Installation

The installation is a breeze. Connect the wires and the box takes care of itself. It’s wise to run through the documentation and study the remote control pages.

Operation

I can’t recommend this device enough. The picture quality is superb (and recorded), the sound is great and the operation is easy. I think there are some elements where the UI could be improved but as a general rule it’s awesome. Streaming recorded files from the device to a the PC was a little slow but they worked however they come through as TS files (Transport Stream MPEG-2 Video Stream) which are large and will probably require converting at a later stage to something like xvid or mp4.

If you’re looking for a great PVR for freeview get this

Obviously a lot of companies have been working in this area and Microsoft’s latest product (good name by the way) is an attempt
to bring it into the family environment. It’s attractive, sleek and potentially quite good fun. At a cost of around $3000+ for a
30″ system I think this will be the playtoy for the very well off and not a mainstream product. As with all things the price will tumble and eventually achieve “normal people” penetration.

I must however comment on the “demo” on the MS Surface site (link above). Yes it looks attractive, yes some of the things it does look fun but heres two some (1) gripes about the demo and (2) concerns

Gripes:
1. Placing “random” hardware items (read camera/phone) onto a glass table computer and within a millisecond pulling off and placing all photos onto the desktop seems totally unrealistic. Firstly, you have to assume the item is already connected “somehow” to the system be it by bluetooth or wifi. Second to connect, find, access and read “data” from these devices is never a millisecond job - the demo tries to convince you it is..

2. The credit card scene is just nuts. I cant begin to say how much i hate this. Maybe it is possible but the giant “leap” of advancement from our current method to this…

Concern:
Whats the point? I understand its a new interface to work with computing but it’s limited in scope. Looking down at the screen and not actually being able to face it directly means you’re more than likely not going to be able to use this as a workstation/proper computer.

I can only conclude it’s destined to be an entertainment centre of sorts and even then who wants to watch video on a screen in the middle of a table, its not like you can sit back in your chair and watch a movie..

Now, I understand the idea behind it and I also like the idea of moving ahead with newer ways of getting information from our brains into computers but I just couldnt really get this to work.. at any speed atleast. The idea is good but for me the suggested letters start to take up too much of the view whilst the actual letters I wanted tended to stay hidden.

For instance typing “I am not going to be af” was easy and very quick but when I want to complete the last word to say “afraid” I am presented initially with options they think are more important thus loosing the focus on the letters I want and in turn making me slow down my approach. Now, next I wanted to write “of” but on entering “o” Im presented with N, R and U as priority letters and “f” is hidden away. I think this is an interesting idea but I would prefer the letter all FLAT allowing me to quickly shift into the correct location because I know exactly what direction to go given a symetric A-Z vertical list.

Im not sure this will take off as I dont really think its any faster and the keybaord is to … easy by comparison - I dont even have to look at the keyboard anymore to type so its not a hardship to write.

What are your thoughts?

Anyway, I was at the pub, I stepped on mine and smashed the screen So! Creative offer a £125 price for exchange of the device - not a bad deal since a new one will set me back another £220.

So what do I think? Not bad, small and descreet with typical Apple styling. They get hot, quickly, but overall I think they are a nice design and the plug and play straight into the HDMI of your nearest HDTV is quick and simple. I had a go on the 63″ Samsung Plasma (720p) and it was nice.

Connectivity to ethernet or wireless is easy (though the keyboard and nav stuff to enter passwords is… interesting . iTunes needs to be v7.1+ to work with iTV. I’ll play around more with it when I get the chance - so far the resultion of the media clips available via the web are.. poor when you consider that Apple is specifically aiming this product at the HDTV market where we expect HIGH resolution content.

Personally I’m going to wait and see. Ill only give this thing the slightest hint of my OWN money when there are reliable hacks for XviD, DivX, maybe H.264 and MPG. I have no interest in paying Apple a bean until the content I have plays without issue. Nice try, but eventually they WILL learn. It’s funny that Apple has no issue pushing out MP3 playback on it’s devices but denies XviD and such which are the most popular media codecs out there.

Ill post a pic when I get a chance.

I was at the conference this week and it was pretty good. Some interesting things were shown and said and I’ve come away with perhaps a few more ideas and new things to try out.

I have to say that the conference does seem to be a lot about the sponsoring companies getting significant air time to big up their own products which isn’t something I really appreciate.

Chris Wilson did a decent talk about Internet Explorer, it’s evolution and where it is today but I was more interested in his ideas for the next generation of web browser. For me personally, I felt as though this was more a talk and promotion of MSIE 7 than a talk about where we are going next. He is obviously influential in the development of the browser and it would have been great to hear about what things he thinks and perhaps we are going to see in future revision of the browser.

Rasmus was awesome, I thought he gave a decent enough talk and the tools he was using to profile PHP loads was very interesting. If you can get a hold of his notes then you should, I scrawled down references to KCacheGrind, Valgrind and Callgrind, all of which combined to profile the load times within a PHP script. Very cool.

Simon Willison was good too actually. He was enthusiastic about openID (which looks good) and he gave a decent rundown of what’s involved and why its good but also bad. I think we’re a long way off from seeing this adopted in the mainstream but I think with some time and development it will become big. I think the best question from the floor came at this point when asking about single logins from non-web applications. Simons answer was that we should solve one thing at a time (UNIX style) and he has a point. Bringing up a small browser window in an application is no big deal so login could be easy and information easily obtained back into the main application – actually I may try this tonight.

Anyway, it was a good day and it’s good to see other people hyped about all this stuff and ending on Brice’s talk about contactoffice.com was great – he was awesome 

Simply put, the following is how it works.


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Anyway - it might be of some use in something you do.

We got an S-Video lead and it worked fine but the question came as to why the resolution seemed a little blurry/low. I didn’t know this but S-Video only outputs at 480i or 576i resolutions (so basically standard def resolution). To actually push out the content at a cool 1080i you needed to connect up the composite out and then into the composite IN on the TV. It looked lovely and was running at a cool 720p - the quality difference is significant to say the least. For those of us in England, high def stuff is still fairly new and not common place so actually seeing a film of yourself and people you know in HD is very cool

ON a complete side point I’m going to be wiping Vista from my hard disk (i hate it - i’ve been through all the versions since longhorn previews and the final thing is far from finished). I will be creating a lovely XP SP2 system with a partition for Ubuntu 6.10 EDGY. Im probably going to push myself to start using Ubuntu permenantly - I did for a bout 6 months a few years ago but I fancy going back to it!

Current setup: AMD 64 3400 - Fatality ABIT board - 2×200GB Maxtor SATA II - 2×350GD Seagate SATAII (1.1 Terrabytes ) - 2 GIG Corsair - 6800 GT Nvidia (Note: I dont play games much so I dont really need a great GFX).

I’m tempted to go forward to the Intel Core Duo but Im going to wait a while and see what happens - I hear that AMD is going to push out QUAD core soon so I am waiting on this.. I am an AMD fan boy!

Charlie Brooker Article

Charlie missed out a good point too.. Mac’s are apparently so cool and amazing that Apple decided to launch boot camp to enable people to load Windows on Mac hardware.. hmm… sounds like they recognise Windows and the PC are pretty good. Utterly lame adverts. Next!