2004/03/30 15:14:00
Digital TV has been waiting a long time for the NetGem i-player. This
splendid little set top box is what digital TV is supposed to be
about. With the usual Freeview features such as crystal clear sound
and vision, program guides, and digital text you get all you would
expect from a modern digital TV. But this one has all the bells and
whistles that you could dream of thrown in for free. The main one
being it’s Internet connectivity, allowing you to browse the
web, send and receive emails. This can be done over a dial-up link
by plugging it into the phone line or using a USB network card
across your broadband connection.
With the addition of a USB port they have opened up the ideas and
future of this product in the extreme. You can attach printers,
webcams, and wireless LAN adapters currently but as you can also
update the software it should allow all sorts of possibilities.
It is really fast allowing real channel surfing and making the digital text really easy to use. This alone makes it a world better than the old ITV Digital box that I had before.Along the top of the keyboard are some shortcut buttons that are setup to take you to a set of items. The Shops button for instance takes you to sites such as Tesco and John Lewis, the find-it button gives you yellow pages, multimap and dictionary.com.
There is already an i-player hacking site and an active forum so there should be some interesting new hacks appearing soon! Changing some of the quick link buttons would be cool!
The only problem I have with it so far is that I can’t get it to use WEP security on my wireless LAN connection as yet.
Listen to this podcast