Hasta La Gadget!

Netflix, Vudu, Unbox and Apple TV may be around, but if there’s one name in rentals that can take streaming mainstream, it’s Blockbuster. Unfortunately, their first attempt at a streaming media box falls short.

The Pitch
You buy the $99 box, built by broadband gear maker 2Wire, and you can stream Blockbuster rentals to your television. After your first 25 free rentals, you pay whatever titles are marked. (Star Wars: The Clone Wars was $3.99 plus tax. Whatever unlimited package you may have with Blockbuster DVD rentals does not apply.) All movies are downloaded to the system. The downloads do expire within the 24 hours you begin watching, but movies can also be purchased. Blockbuster has about 2200 titles available at the moment and the new release section leaves something to be desired with big, not-too-recent films like Iron Man still missing. Of the 2,200 or so movies and tv shows, I found 10 HD titles on the system.

The Hardware
My initial impressions of the 2Wire hardware are largely positive. The box is small, light, runs cool and packs a smart (though disabled) SD expansion slot on top of the 8GB of internal storage. The bundled remote is definitely a tad too small, and it’s covered with those multicolored “we haven’t totally thought this through so we left some room to fudge” buttons. More on that in a moment.

Setup
Setting up is very easy. After plugging it in, you wait a few minutes and go through a quick 5-step process that requires you to sync a Blockbuster account with a randomly generated box serial number. I was browsing movies in something like 2 minutes after plugging it into my TV and router. Like the Roku Netflix box, you have choice of wi-fi or ethernet.

The Interface
The interface is where things go wrong. You know, I don’t even mind the horribly spartan blue screens—I get the Blockbuster branding attempts here, even if it evokes bad BSoD memories. But there’s nothing all that pleasurable or intuitive about the system.
The search menu is a good example of the often strange navigation strategies. Much like a TiVo, you type in your title that you’d like to find, and a list propagates on the right. Then, you can either highlight a title and press “OK” on the remote, OR you can highlight the item and press right on the D-pad. But nothing else in the system is left to right menu based.
I realize this sounds petty, but take a few minutes navigating the system and you realize that the UI’s rule set lacks basic coherence.

There are great ideas going on. You can really browse a lot of movies at once. They appear in rows of five, stacked two on a page. In other words, you can see about ten movie selections at a time. Not bad. But then you realize, this cover art looks horrible—nowhere near the sharpness of, say, Netflix cover art. And a literal two-frame animation moves you from one row of movies to another. It’s a flaw I’d have expected to see five years ago. Now, it just looks unpolished.
Oh, and then there are little but very annoying issues I should quickly mention. Hitting the “back” button will take you back, but there’s no way to retrace your steps to whatever you were browsing. You start over. And at least two of the icon buttons on the bundled remote do nothing, ever.

Playing Movies
Once you get to whatever you’d like to watch, the experience is still a bit bumpy. Previewing seems promising, but it takes place in a minuscule box that’s close to worthless. And when you choose to download the movie (yes, it’s physically downloaded/saved to the unit), you don’t just go to viewing the movie. You have to find the movie again in “My Movies.” Then you select it. Then you watch it.

Here’s the catch, though. You can watch the movie nearly immediately (SD in seconds, HD in minutes). But you can’t rewind or fast forward until the entire film downloads to your system. Also, if you stop watching a movie before it downloads, there’s no option to resume. You start over. Frustrating. Once the download is complete, FF and RW works very fluidly, as does resuming. Vudu, which costs a lot more, gives you fluid navigation even when downloading.
Most video is promised to be DVD quality. It falls quite a bit short to my eye, though the framerates are generally smooth. Overall, the SD viewing quality reminds me a lot of Amazon Unbox. I feel like I’ve seen better non-HD quality on Netflix—though I’ve had somewhat mixed results on each platform, honestly. Vudu may still reign in the SD-quality department.

As for HD, it’s a superb disappointment. The 40-minute IMAX movie Dolphins took about 20 minutes to cache (that may be my connection’s fault). But when it did play, the quality was not only very poor (upconverted DVD, I’d say) but the playback was often choppy, constantly jittering to a stop. Why did these slowdowns occur? The media was already on my system! Both Netflix and Vudu HD blow the Blockbuster unit away in HD quality and performance.

Conclusions
Maybe the real mistake of this box is that it’s trying to cater to the less tech friendly, and in doing so, becomes very muddled in its presentation. Netflix has been very smart to force its users to choose downloads online. And though the service is limited to older catalog films available “free” with subscription rather than a la carte new releases, the Roku and Xbox 360 are an absolute pleasure to watch movies on.

The comparison that often came to mind is this Blockbuster 2Wire is the equivalent of a stock cable DVR, rather than the TiVo that most set-top boxes aspire to mimic.

It’s simply not a seamless or fulfilling enough experience to represent the nation’s largest brick-and-mortar movie rental chain, and it’s certainly not good enough to impress us when Netflix, Apple TV and Vudu are all doing it better. With a few aggressive firmware updates and the right rental plan from Blockbuster, I might be willing to revisit the option. But until then, it’s a Blockbuster product in name only.

The full details won’t be available until CES this year, but Vuzix is already teasing us with this image of their Wrap 920AV video glasses.

Apparently, the Wrao 920AV will be “the first to actually function as sunglasses or portable video eyewear. It’ll combine virtual reality (VR) capabilities as well as augmented reality (AR) features.” Holy crap that is awesome. We have enjoyed Vuzix products in the past, but these things have us giddy with excitement. [Vuzix]

The folks at Lumicure have been talking up OLEDs as a potential tool to treat skin cancer for a few years now and, while they still don’t exactly have a whole lot to show for themselves, they’re now claiming that they’re making “excellent progress,” and that they actually hope to have a product on the market by the fourth quarter of 2009. That progress is apparently due in large part to the $5 million in funding they received earlier this year although, again, they don’t seem to be saying how that money is being put to use. The basic technology, first shown off more than two years ago, consists of a band-aid-type device that’s connected to a battery, which lets the patient wear the device all day long, and is apparently more cost-effective and less painful than other methods of treatment. Apparently, the company is so pleased with its progress that it’s already starting to focus on its next target: acne.

[Via OLED-Info.com, image courtesy LEDs Magazine]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Lumicure claims to be making progress in using OLEDs to treat skin cancer originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Finally, a pair of video glasses that don't make you look like an extra on an '80s sci-fi B movie.

(Credit: Vuzix)

There’s little doubt that as we inch closer to the technological singularity, video-enabled glasses will play a part. Unfortunately, manufacturers have yet to produce …

Originally posted at CES 2009

Although G1 users have that sweet compass-based Street View implementation, we haven’t heard much about turn-by-turn nav on Android until now — AndNav2 is a new alpha app that uses OpenStreetMap data to get you where you’re going. It’s currently supported in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, France, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, and Italy — apparently the folks at AndNav don’t have server enough for a Stateside implementation, although they hope to have this remedied in the future. In the meantime, it looks like Americans hoping to get from one place to another will have to either continue to rely on their superior sense of direction or, more likely, their Knight Rider GPS.

[Via Googleandblog]

Continue reading AndNav2 brings turn-by-turn navigation to the European Android jet set

Filed under: Cellphones

AndNav2 brings turn-by-turn navigation to the European Android jet set originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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