… and I’m still not sure I want it!
I turned on my DirecTV HD DVR last night and realized “someone” had upgraded it in the last 24 hours. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my wife. So either a very technically savvy criminal broke into my house and upgraded the box for me, or DirecTV pushed out a substantial upgrade.
The upgrade is a significantly different interface. It now uses a folder icon to denote levels in the playlist (which is nice … even if the UI needs some serious “polishing”). I haven’t stumbled along too many new features yet, although there is now a legend at the bottom of some of the screens assigning features to the four colored buttons on the remote (I was wondering what those would do).
In all, the interface is an improvement, but no where near as slick as TiVo or Windows Media … eh… whatever they’re calling that now. Oh, and DirecTV wants to remind you often that you are watching DirecTV. Nearly every screen (including the status bar / play-time indicator) has an obnoxious DirecTV logo on it.
I’ve been trying to find out more information about the upgrade, since DirecTV didn’t feel the need to tell me ahead of the time that it was going to apply it. They also didn’t feel the need to leave a message in the messages area about it either. Maybe they didn’t think I’d notice that the whole UI changed?
I did check their “Latest News” section of their website, which doesn’t say anything. A search turned up an article which makes it look like there will be an upgrade that will transform it into a TiVo (which would be AWESOME, but I don’t think it will happen).
Searching for more information about the upgrade made me quickly realize that there aren’t many blogs out there on the topic either … not many that have been updated more recently than January of last year anyway. — If you know of one, please do tell!
Oh, Apple. Why couldn’t you just build some DVR-goodness into AppleTV?!? Name the price, I’ll pay it!
What people here are saying…