It's a brilliant design that prompts appreciation from everyone who comes across it - it's easily the best home theater keyboard we've ever come across. The front side holds a four-way D-pad with select button, a play / pause buttons, and a menu button, while the rear has a very nice small QWERTY keyboard for easy searches. Of course, the most important part of the Boxee Box experience isn't the box - it's the remote! We fell in love with Boxee's two-faced QWERTY remote the first time we saw it at CES, and those feelings have mostly survived the honeymoon period. Although there are some differences between Boxee's board and Google TV - we're told the WiFi chip is different, for example - overall the Boxee Box makes the Revue and Sony's Internet TV Blu-ray player look comically oversized for the platform they contain. Internally, the Boxee Box uses an Intel CE4110 chip, which is "nearly identical" to the CE4150 found in Google TV devices, 1GB of flash memory, and 1GB of RAM. We will say that it's much more attractive than any of the Google TV devices we've seen the Logitech Revue looks like a generic piece of Tupperware in comparison. It's a polarizing design - we have a lot of room in our A/V rack, so we rather like it, but if you're tight for space you might have different feelings. The bottom is made of a bright green rubber, while the back houses Ethernet, HDMI, optical and composite audio-out jacks, two USB ports and the power socket, all slanted downwards at the odd angle dictated by the case. The asymmetrical shape makes sit larger than it really is - although it's not much bigger in footprint than an Apple TV, it can't be stacked or hidden away too easily. Unlike most other connected TV devices, the Boxee Box is designed to stand out - it's a cube sliced sharply across the bottom, with a glossy fingerprint-magnet front and a glowing green logo, lending it a decidedly futuristic appearance. So have Boxee CEO Avner Ronen and company pulled it off? Is the Boxee Box the ultimate connected TV device? Or has a punk rock media revolution turned into just another polite New Wave streamer? Read on for the full Engadget review to find out!%Gallery-107418% That's a lot of changes, and, quite frankly, a lot of hype - Boxee's dedicated fans are expecting the small company and its asymmetrical Box to show up no less than Apple and Google. What's more, Boxee's gone from being an upstart rock'n'roll rebel to a legit market player, with a Netflix deal on the books and - wonder of wonders - an agreement to bring Hulu Plus to the Boxee Box sometime next year. But a platform switch from NVIDIA's Tegra 2 chip to Intel's Atom-based CE4100 platform cost Boxee and D-Link valuable time, while the Boxee software went through a dramatic UI transformation from the beta to 1.0. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are not indicative of the opinions or positions of Hyundai.It's a little strange that the Boxee Box by D-Link feels like a late entrant in this year's crowded smart TV market - the core Boxee software has been around forever, and the Box itself was announced way back in January at CES. If holding an actual remote sounds too old school iPhone and Android apps will let you do the same things via your phone.ĭisclosure: Promotional consideration was provided by Hyundai via Brash Media. Navigating through it all thankfully doesn’t require wielding a chunky full sized keyboard either, since a nifty dual-sided QWERTY remote provides all the buttons you’ll need in a palm-friendly package. There’s also a fully functional web browser with Flash support and plenty of apps like MLB.tv NHL, and Pandora to add on to the media dog pile. On the software front, Boxxee’s highly praised UI neatly organizes media from a variety of sources including Netflix, Hulu Plus, Vudu, and just about any other form of audio or video you have stored locally on a hard drive, SD card, or other networked computer. Its strange exterior isn’t the most home theater friendly design we’ve seen, but aesthetics aside, it still packs everything you’ll need to connect including an HDMI out port, wireless n networking, two USB ports, and an SD card reader. Tired of shelling out cash every month to your local cable provider for channels you never watch? Well the Boxee Box is the best solution currently on the market for letting you access all of the digital content you love sans a monthly subscription.
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