Web Apps.

As well as allowing you to view any media file on your home network, the Popbox lets you access media from a whole host of sources on the web.

It does this by using apps that can be freely downloaded and installed from the Popbox servers, from right within the interface.

Once downloaded these apps will let you access a variety of different services, including BBC iPlayer, YouTube, Revision3 and Facebook.  The great thing about this is that you no longer need to sit in front of the computer to watch a video on the Internet, you can sit in front of your TV and access it with a few clicks of the remote.

It’s a shame that the remote doesn’t feature some form of keyboard, though.  It means that putting a search term into one of these apps can take longer than it needs to.  We really would have preferred a physical keyboard, or even text entry via a number pad.

We found the web apps to work quite well, though some could do with a bit of work to speed them up.  BBC iPlayer works particularly well, we were able to find a program and begin watching within a few seconds of the app starting.

 

Conclusions.

We’re big fans of the whole “centralised media storage” concept.  We can really see a market for this type of device in the home, and unlike the Boxee Box the Popbox will fit nicely amongst your existing media devices.

As we stated before, we’d have preferred some method of text entry other than an on screen keyboard.  We had some particularly long network paths to enter while setting up the Popbox and it began to make our arms sore after a while.

We also found that if the Popbox isn’t able to identify a TV series using the online database, it can add each and every episode as a different TV show, which really messes up the interface and slows it down no end.  We suspect that this is an issue with IMDB rather than the Popbox, though, as we’ve had similar problems with other devices.

The freedom to use other online databases would have been nice as well.  As good as IMDB is for movies, it’s no where near as accurate as the TVDB when it comes to TV show information.

We’ve kind of been spoiled by using XBMC and Boxee on PC’s though, and when remembering that this is a tiny set-top box it’s easy to be impressed with the Popbox.

Overall, we probably wouldn’t buy one ourselves (we already have PC’s sat under our TV’s), but we would recommend it to friends or family.