Occasional Observations

The whole deal with convergence stories is that in addition to creating multi-function devices, they’re supposed to make life easier, right? So I can make phone calls from my computer and browse the web with my mobile. Both concepts are now well-established and the bugs are largely ironed out: pretty easy to set up and use. These days, Skype usually tells me around 10m or more people are logged-in, in the early days it was a few hundred thou.

Netgear, a networking company, has jumped on the convergence between multimedia home entertainment and the PC, coming up with its EVA700 Media Center Extender device. It sounds great: a W-LAN connection to your hi-fi cabinet, streaming audio, video and photos to the big screen and audiophile speakers in your living room. Just plug and play.

At under EUR200 if you shop around, it’s a lot less than a full-blown Media Center PC, which is probably family room overkill anyway, and I’m not in favor of leaving a machine on all the time when it’s used for a few hours a week. Hence the debut of the Netgear EVA700.

Great idea – except that it doesn’t (yet) do the bit I expected Netgear would be best at: wireless networking. It insists on a wired setup first – and since I didn’t have a 15-meter Ethernet cable to hand yesterday, the whole setup has slipped by 24 hours. Did manage to persuade Eva to play an MP3 from a USB stick, and then an AVI file, but the user interface is basic, clunky and messy, and it doesn’t appear to work with NTFS-formatted drives. Vista compatibility? You’re joking, right?

The wired setup tonight is the acid test – otherwise I’ll send it back. No, an Apple iTV won’t do instead. My serious reservations about Apple product quality were reinforced when I looked at an iTV demo unit the other day, and it was running really hot – almost too hot to touch. As the enterprise server guys will tell you, stuff that runs too hot is more likely to fail. Not to mention all that ‘lecky I’m converting to heat for no reason.