I just got my XS today. Sadly, as soon as I hooked it up, my 65" took a dive. Oh well..nearly 12 years on that set. Time to look at one of the ginormous Mitsus.
First impressions: Wow this thing is small. Remote is very very simple and kid like (makes sense, games and all). It has no volume buttons, which means unless this thing works with my Harmony, I"m back to multiple remotes. (Need to look into this).
Anyway, hooked it up to my PC monitor and it was pretty breezy to set up and quite responsive. Immediately I had a firmware/software update so I waited for it to do that.
Immediately after that I do have a few complaints though.
1. Right out of the box, the first thing you have to do is go register it with Roku. That in itself is not an issue, but what IS an issue is the fact that to even use it you MUST give them a credit card to keep in case you "purchase" something. I'm sorry, but in this day and age of companies losing peoples information left and right, I think it's time they quit doing this. Not only that, as far as I can see, there is nothing on their web site that says this is a requirement. I'm sure it wouldn't annoy everyone, but I certainly think there is enough free content on it that it should not be a requirement and just deny you purchases unless you give them one.
2. There is no off button on the remote as far as I can find. I "THINK" it turns off automatically after some time of being on the home screen, but when you add channels this creates a problem as it really wants to reboot afterwards, but tends to hang. On top of that when you first go to add channels, it wants to install Angry Birds very badly, even though I don't want it. The unfortunate thing about this is you cannot add any channels until it finishes doing this. For me, this took way longer than it should have because it would constantly just go back to the main screen without finishing, so the next time I'd click to add channels it would do it again. After it finally finished installing I could do nothing at all. It pretty much needed a reboot, but alas, no off button. I had to manually unplug it and plug it back in, at which point it looked like it was doing another update.
After this point though, everything was smooth. The menu is straight forward and easy to understand. I added channels and started surfing. The videos streamed well in HD even over an old wireless g router. (I have an N with dlna I need to hook up yet). There is alot of content that is not HD but it shows you the quality by a star rating as it's buffering.
Three more points of complaint but not as much of an issue:
1. No you tube - At least directly, it has it's own online video collection channel you can add that is probably similar and has a search function.
2. Does not play AVI's (which I knew already). I really don't understand why this was left out unless they thought it would cut into the pay site profits.
3. Most of the stream your own video channels are subscribe channels. I am sure there's a free way to do it, I just haven't had the time to look yet.
The free movie channel that I watched (I forget what it's called now) had a good selection of movies to choose from. I randomly chose a movie I hadn't seen and watched it to get an idea of how it worked long term. HD quality video with no buffering issues, however it interrupts viewing every 10 minutes or so with a commercial. This isn't so bad except it's the SAME commercial every time. This gets kind of annoying through a hour and a half movie.
For people who enjoy Netflix, Amazon and Hulu streams, this is a very simple way to get all easily. I personally am still not sold on subscription based streaming, but that is just me. While I have a fast connection, it's not blazing by any means and streaming a HD movie would pretty much tap my line and leave me unable to do much of anything else that is somewhat intensive. Call me ADD, but I tend to use my PC while having movies play in the background....and if I'm going to just watch local avi's and dvds/blu rays, then I don't need streaming accounts right? Obviously there are alot of fans of this method though, and this seems to do it well.
This is my overall first impression. So far I enjoy it, however unless I want to purchase subscriptions to 5 different services, I am not sure I'm going to keep it. It's possible the free content will continue to expand and improve however. There is a lot of variety of content here, but there is a lot of useless content for a majority of people as well. As with all media devices it's got it's pluses and minuses. Even though the above may seem to lean to the negative, it is quite a nifty box. I would say it does everything my PBO doesn't, but my PBO does alot of things it doesn't as well. Maybe they can complement each other. It remains to be seen.
