Bill Watt’s Blog

I’ve had a Slingbox from SlingMedia for about a month now and I love it. You basically connect this small box to any media device (DVR, cbl box, whatever) and to your internet connection and it streams whatever it sees. I love having it hooked to my ReplayTV so I can connect through my laptop or my PC and watch what I want and get the benefit of the commercial skip (saves me having any lag from remotely controlling the DVR) that came with the earlier ReplayTV.

Now, for those of you that don’t know me, I hate to travel. I really like being near all my stuff. This device seems to have the best application for people that are on the road a decent amount of time but for $250 it was cheap enough for me to try it. I’ve really enjoyed having the option to watch live or recorded shows from where ever I am. Where DVR’s were responsible for “time shifting” this device wants to be known for helping “place shift” and enable watching from any location with an internet connection.

For all the positives, I’m not sold on the mass marketability of this as a standalone product. I’d love to see them do a deal with Tivo, Comcast, Mototola or any of the big cbl box manufacturers that are also expanding into the broadband arena and just have them offer this as a feature. It would be nice to have one less thing sitting on the TV.

For now the Slingbox gets a rave review from me… you just need to figure out if you’ll ever use it and if you think you will then I encourage you to get it. I think you’ll really like it.

Ah, where to start… let’s start with the good.

My new Xbox 360 is awesome. I bought it on eBay because the stores didn’t have them and I wasn’t willing to sleep outside to get one. It looks good, features are pretty cool, and it appealed to my geekness right from the first moment it powered up. It was simple to setup and even looking at the menus in HD found me saying “wow, that’s awesome.” The opening scenes of Call of Duty 2 were equally awesome and I’m looking forward to the next wave of games to see what else they can do with it.

I’ve never been a huge fan of wireless controllers in general, I like wired connections because they’re “guaranteed” but I think the Xbox controller may have convinced me to give up that old way of thinking. It was simple to use, the connection is really responsive, and I like that they provided the option to turn off the console when I turn off the controller.

What is a review without the negative?

There were a couple odd things about the whole Xbox purchasing experience that I think are worth pointing out. First is my anger at the whole distribution process. Many stores I went to had a maximum of 40 units on opening day which leads to a bunch of speculation around Microsoft planning poorly, rushing to get the units out as soon as possible, or just orchestrating the constraints as a publicity garnering event.

No matter what ends up being the real reason, it was bad. The stores all knew they had us salivating and they took full advantage. I don’t fully hate them but it certainly stinks being the buyer in a sellers market. I hate how they were bundling in all the warranties and forcing games on me. Pricing was all over the board because they took two defined systems and made their own bundles so you never knew what was available from one place to another. Add to that Microsoft’s press statements about trying to ship units weekly, some stores saying they’ll get units on Dec 12th, and a ton of online stores telling you to check back in Feb and it is just craziness. It really won’t surprise me if all my friends get them in 3 or 4 weeks for retail price and none of these crazy bundle restrictions… but that’s my fault for wanting it now.

The unit itself is meant to be cool looking and I do think it is better then the old Xbox design. The unit is pretty loud, so much so that my wife is asking how often I’m going to have it running, and now I’m reading in different places that the units can overheat. The power supply is huge which is also kind of annoying.

Setting up Xbox Live was kind of a pain. I’m going to look and see if I can do any of it from my PC and skip the typing via controller. Also, I entered all this info only to find the Xbox didn’t think it could find Live. There was no option to save my data (privacy / security was probably the reason) which was a major hassle. I decided to escape out and test my connection. I doubt anyone will be surprised to find I connected to the internet with no problem. I downloaded the first of what I will assume will be many patches from Microsoft and then said “Screw this!” and decided it was time to go to sleep instead of starting over.

All that said…
I’m still thinking about braving the Black Friday crowds and picking up some games because I can’t wait to play more.