Pictures
I consider the picture album feature almost a throwaway. It was easy to add, so it was included, but I don't know anyone who actually uses their TV to browse through their photos (my apologies to those of you out there who do!)
Basically, the photo album feature operates identically to the music feature, meaning you get to view on folder at a time. Figure 10 shows this in play on my TV, and its certainly nice, but the lack of tagging and organization makes it a bit lame compared to a web site like Flickr.com.
Conclusions
If you're looking at price performance, I think the TVisto can't be beat. I won't be surprised if an iPod will be able to do all of these things soon (except for playing DVDs you've ripped yourself), but even then, the form factor will always mean you are paying a huge penalty for disk space. My $200 TVisto has 300G of disk space--an iPod with 1/5 that space costs twice as much.
The one thing that would take this product from second base to home would be network access. Given that it is running a standard Linux distribution, I have to believe that it would be fairly easy to supporta USB network interface. If I could load new media on the TVisto without having to lug it from one room to another, I think I would then be ableto say the TVisto 3500 is feature complete. (Opening this box up for community software development might be one way to get those new features in more quickly.)
A few notes on pros and cons to help you with your buying decision:
Pro:
- No fan.
- Small footprint.
- Very inexpensive.
- Plays ISO-ripped DVDs.
- Plays DivX compressed video.
- OS independent.
Con:
- No protected music.
- No network access.
- Lots of UI limitations. Slow scan through music and photos.
- No playlists.
- No shuffling across folders.
- Doesn't read ID3V2 tags.
Look at it this way: In the worst case, you'll still get to use it as a portable hard drive!
Mark Nelson can be contacted at [email protected].
