SatelliteGuys.US First Look – A PocketDISH Review
By Scott Greczkowski
Copyright 2005 SatelliteGuys.US – All Rights Reserved.
Take your favorite Dish Network programming with you to watch anywhere, which is something that the PocketDISH promises, but how does it hold up? In this SatelliteGuys.US review of the new PocketDISH units we will take a look at this amazing new gizmo which shows sometimes good things do come in small boxes.
For this review we received the Archos AV402E PocketDISH unit which is the smallest PocketDISH available. The AV402E features a 2.2 inch screen and packs some nice features which are not found on the more expensive 7 inch version.
The PocketDISH arrived shipped to us by DishStore.NET, inside the box which was packed by DishStore.NET there was another plain brown box, inside that was another box with the retail packaging for the PocketDISH which was shrink wrapped. I quickly tore off the shrink rap to find that the PocketDISH was inside another box. So after opening all 4 boxes there it was the PocketDISH, which was the first thing you saw when you opened the box.
Under the black plastic holder for the pocket dish were all the manuals and accessories for the unit, including USB, AV Cables and a power supply unit.
The first manual on the top was the quick start guide.
http://www.satelliteguys.us/pocketdish/PocketDISH_AV402E_Quick_Reference_Guide.pdf in this guide the first instruction is to charge the unit, so I plugged in the PocketDISH and charged it up.
After charging I decided to plug the PocketDISH into the USB 2.0 port on my laptop, Before doing that however I searched my PocketDISH box for a CD so I could load the software for it on my PC. I was surprised after I flipped through the instruction manual that the unit came with no software. I plugged the unit into my laptop and was surprised to see that the laptop recognized the laptop instantly.
The PocketDISH is basically a external hard drive when you plug it into your PC the PocketDISH is assigned a hard drive letter, and you can browse all the folders on the PocketDISH. And you were able to copy files to and from the PocketDISH with no problems.
Since at first I did not have access to my Dish Network 942 at my office I instead decided to do experiments on my PocketDISH. I decided to copy some AVI’s MPEGS and WMV files to the PocketDISH unit.
To my surprise NONE of the files would play on the PocketDISH Media Player. (And they call this a media player?)
I quickly ripped out the instruction manual and found out I needed to convert all the video media I wanted to play to MPEG4. The manual gave instructions on how to install the MPEG4 conversion software and the Virtual Dub software needed to make it all work.
Because I am a computer person I was able to install everything and link it all together, however the instructions were very vague many novice computer users will have a hard time at figuring things out.
After the software is installed you need to find the video you want to encode and then send it to the PocketDISH in the correct directory when finished. The process of moving videos from your computer is cumbersome and will frustrate a lot of folks.
After I was able to get my files converted to MPEG4 and moved to the PocketDISH I was then able to view my movies on the PocketDISH. In my opinion there is no reason a person should have to jump through all these hoops just to watch videos from their PC on their portable media player.
If Dish wants this PocketDISH to become a popular item to consumers they need to have someone write a program which a user can install if they want which will help them convert and copy things to their PocketDISH units. You should not have to be an expert computer user to do this. In fact I believe that the program should be so simple that the consumer does not even know that their video is being converted to a medium which the PocketDISH can understand.
To me this was the most major flaw the PocketDISH had.
After fooling around with the video features I decided to press my luck and try the MP3 player in the PocketDISH. I copied some MP3 files into the PocketDISH and instantly fell in love with the MP3 Interface this unit has.
The love affair was soon gone after listening to 5 of the 8 songs I copied to the PocketDISH when an error message popped on my screen telling me my PocketDISH had a hard drive error! I pressed the OK button and got the error message a few more time, then I noticed something a few of my songs were gone. It is my guess that the songs were in a MP3 format which the PocketDISH could not play.
The unit should have displayed an error message such as “Unreadable MP3 format” instead of the hard drive error it gave me.
I also tried seeing how well the PocketDISH did with the commercial MP3 services, so first I tried grabbing a song from ITUNES. The PocketDISH would not play the song downloaded from them. (This is a big downer especially if you already have an IPOD and have purchased a lot of music from ITUNES)
I then tried downloading a song from WalMart.COM and putting it on the PocketDISH using Windows Media player, I am happy to report that this worked fine. When Windows Media uploaded the song to the PocketDISH is obtained the proper license file for the song and transferred it to the PocketDISH.
Next up I tried viewing photos with the PocketDISH, I was able to plug in the USB cable from the PocketDISH to the USB port on my Nikon D50 digital and was able to copy photos from the camera to the PocketDISH. The copying went great, but these super hires photos looked terrible on the PocketDISH. After some fooling around I found the best resolution to use for your photos to view them on the PocketDISH is 640x480. Do NOT buy a PocketDISH if you want to view a lot of pictures on it.
A neat feature on the PocketDISH is the built in voice recorder, you can record audio using built in microphone, and this feature came in handy for use as a pocket tape recorder.
Another feature of the 2.2 inch 420E model is that you can play games on the PocketDISH, the unit comes with 8 demo games, with the most interesting one being Gold Pro Contest. However the games were hard to play and the graphics were terrible. These games are demos, and to purchase the real versions you need to go to Archos’ site at http://www.archos.com/products/games_list.html but ordering them here is confusing as in the supported products listing there is no listing for PocketDISH compatible games.
The price of games are from $5.95 - $8.95. Archos needs to fix their website to mention the new PocketDISH Units and the games and accessories which are available for it.
The PocketDISH with all the other bells and whistles aside is advertised to do one thing and that is to take you favorite Dish Network DVR’ed shows with you to watch when and where you want on your PocketDISH and I am very happy to report that it does it well!
Upon plugging my PocketDISH into my 942 I got a message on my TV screen that I connected a “multimedia device” and asked me if I would like to view or manage its contents. Of course I selected yes which took me to the PocketDISH screen, which gave me options to Manage Recording, Send Recordings to the Device. In addition I could download photos from the PocketDISH to my 942.
I selected the option to send video to the PocketDISH, which took me to another screen where I could select the shows I wanted to send to the PocketDISH. I selected my 2 year old sons favorite shows and WWE Raw which totaled 5 hours of video recordings and sent them to the PocketDISH which copied them down in only 30 minutes. While the files were copying over you could watch TV and you could see the status of the download by going to the PocketDISH screen from the 942.
After the copying was done I wanted to see how things looked so I unplugged the PocketDISH from the 942. It appeared that the 942 did some kind of firmware update to the PocketDISH as I was required to plug in power to the unit as it updated its firmware and rebooted.
Once rebooted I went to the Video Screen on the PocketDISH, I now had a new Dish Network folder where I found all my programs I transferred over. As a test I selected Dora the Explorer, my 2 year old son saw Dora on the screen and grabbed the PocketDISH out of my hands and went and sat in his bed and watched the entire episode! I place a pair of headphones on his head and he didn’t mind. When the show was done he gave me the PocketDISH back. I was happy that he enjoyed watching the PocketDISH as this was my main reason for getting the PocketDISH! My son likes to hog our TV in the bedroom; it is our hope that with the PocketDISH he can still enjoy his favorite shows no matter where we are and so far so good! I was amazed that he did not have issues with the headphones.
I got to sit down and watch WWE Raw, I was amazed how good the sound was! The PQ was acceptable, while the picture was grainy it was indeed watchable, and after a few moments I was able to ignore the pixels (or screen door effect) that I saw and watched the show. When holding the unit a foot and a half to two feet away I was able to enjoy the show, and while the 7 inch version would be better, the 2.2 inch screen was acceptable to me for watching shows!
Overall the main feature on the PocketDISH works and works well. For people only buying the PocketDISH to watch shows off of their Dish Network DVR’s they will like it, however for those looking to use other features like transfer movies from their PC to the PocketDISH might be disappointed.
While Dish and Archos have the DVR side of things down, they need to work on making a program for the PocketDISH which gives the consumer the same ease of use they get from the DVR side of things. Many people getting a PocketDISH might not be as computer savvy as others and the transferring and converting of files to work on the PocketDISH will be confusing to many.
I give the 2.2 Inch version of the PocketDISH a 3 out of 5 stars. Dish and Archos need to work to make this product friendly to everyone. They need to take a look at the IPOD and see how Apple made the product easy for all to use. If they could make software for the PocketDISH which made it more plug and play my rating would easily increase to four and a half stars out of five.
Archos also needs to work on its website as a lot of features such as games and firmware updates tell you to go to Archos.COM for more information, however when you get there, there is ZERO mention of the PocketDISH units. Even the games area has no mention of the PocketDISH.
Within the next week I am expecting a 7 Inch PocketDISH and I will also review that one and let you know how the 2.5 compares to the 7 inch model.
OVERALL RATING - 3 out of 5 Stars
By Scott Greczkowski
Copyright 2005 SatelliteGuys.US – All Rights Reserved.
Take your favorite Dish Network programming with you to watch anywhere, which is something that the PocketDISH promises, but how does it hold up? In this SatelliteGuys.US review of the new PocketDISH units we will take a look at this amazing new gizmo which shows sometimes good things do come in small boxes.
For this review we received the Archos AV402E PocketDISH unit which is the smallest PocketDISH available. The AV402E features a 2.2 inch screen and packs some nice features which are not found on the more expensive 7 inch version.
The PocketDISH arrived shipped to us by DishStore.NET, inside the box which was packed by DishStore.NET there was another plain brown box, inside that was another box with the retail packaging for the PocketDISH which was shrink wrapped. I quickly tore off the shrink rap to find that the PocketDISH was inside another box. So after opening all 4 boxes there it was the PocketDISH, which was the first thing you saw when you opened the box.
Under the black plastic holder for the pocket dish were all the manuals and accessories for the unit, including USB, AV Cables and a power supply unit.
The first manual on the top was the quick start guide.
http://www.satelliteguys.us/pocketdish/PocketDISH_AV402E_Quick_Reference_Guide.pdf in this guide the first instruction is to charge the unit, so I plugged in the PocketDISH and charged it up.
After charging I decided to plug the PocketDISH into the USB 2.0 port on my laptop, Before doing that however I searched my PocketDISH box for a CD so I could load the software for it on my PC. I was surprised after I flipped through the instruction manual that the unit came with no software. I plugged the unit into my laptop and was surprised to see that the laptop recognized the laptop instantly.
The PocketDISH is basically a external hard drive when you plug it into your PC the PocketDISH is assigned a hard drive letter, and you can browse all the folders on the PocketDISH. And you were able to copy files to and from the PocketDISH with no problems.
Since at first I did not have access to my Dish Network 942 at my office I instead decided to do experiments on my PocketDISH. I decided to copy some AVI’s MPEGS and WMV files to the PocketDISH unit.
To my surprise NONE of the files would play on the PocketDISH Media Player. (And they call this a media player?)
I quickly ripped out the instruction manual and found out I needed to convert all the video media I wanted to play to MPEG4. The manual gave instructions on how to install the MPEG4 conversion software and the Virtual Dub software needed to make it all work.
Because I am a computer person I was able to install everything and link it all together, however the instructions were very vague many novice computer users will have a hard time at figuring things out.
After the software is installed you need to find the video you want to encode and then send it to the PocketDISH in the correct directory when finished. The process of moving videos from your computer is cumbersome and will frustrate a lot of folks.
After I was able to get my files converted to MPEG4 and moved to the PocketDISH I was then able to view my movies on the PocketDISH. In my opinion there is no reason a person should have to jump through all these hoops just to watch videos from their PC on their portable media player.
If Dish wants this PocketDISH to become a popular item to consumers they need to have someone write a program which a user can install if they want which will help them convert and copy things to their PocketDISH units. You should not have to be an expert computer user to do this. In fact I believe that the program should be so simple that the consumer does not even know that their video is being converted to a medium which the PocketDISH can understand.
To me this was the most major flaw the PocketDISH had.
After fooling around with the video features I decided to press my luck and try the MP3 player in the PocketDISH. I copied some MP3 files into the PocketDISH and instantly fell in love with the MP3 Interface this unit has.
The love affair was soon gone after listening to 5 of the 8 songs I copied to the PocketDISH when an error message popped on my screen telling me my PocketDISH had a hard drive error! I pressed the OK button and got the error message a few more time, then I noticed something a few of my songs were gone. It is my guess that the songs were in a MP3 format which the PocketDISH could not play.
The unit should have displayed an error message such as “Unreadable MP3 format” instead of the hard drive error it gave me.
I also tried seeing how well the PocketDISH did with the commercial MP3 services, so first I tried grabbing a song from ITUNES. The PocketDISH would not play the song downloaded from them. (This is a big downer especially if you already have an IPOD and have purchased a lot of music from ITUNES)
I then tried downloading a song from WalMart.COM and putting it on the PocketDISH using Windows Media player, I am happy to report that this worked fine. When Windows Media uploaded the song to the PocketDISH is obtained the proper license file for the song and transferred it to the PocketDISH.
Next up I tried viewing photos with the PocketDISH, I was able to plug in the USB cable from the PocketDISH to the USB port on my Nikon D50 digital and was able to copy photos from the camera to the PocketDISH. The copying went great, but these super hires photos looked terrible on the PocketDISH. After some fooling around I found the best resolution to use for your photos to view them on the PocketDISH is 640x480. Do NOT buy a PocketDISH if you want to view a lot of pictures on it.
A neat feature on the PocketDISH is the built in voice recorder, you can record audio using built in microphone, and this feature came in handy for use as a pocket tape recorder.
Another feature of the 2.2 inch 420E model is that you can play games on the PocketDISH, the unit comes with 8 demo games, with the most interesting one being Gold Pro Contest. However the games were hard to play and the graphics were terrible. These games are demos, and to purchase the real versions you need to go to Archos’ site at http://www.archos.com/products/games_list.html but ordering them here is confusing as in the supported products listing there is no listing for PocketDISH compatible games.
The price of games are from $5.95 - $8.95. Archos needs to fix their website to mention the new PocketDISH Units and the games and accessories which are available for it.
The PocketDISH with all the other bells and whistles aside is advertised to do one thing and that is to take you favorite Dish Network DVR’ed shows with you to watch when and where you want on your PocketDISH and I am very happy to report that it does it well!
Upon plugging my PocketDISH into my 942 I got a message on my TV screen that I connected a “multimedia device” and asked me if I would like to view or manage its contents. Of course I selected yes which took me to the PocketDISH screen, which gave me options to Manage Recording, Send Recordings to the Device. In addition I could download photos from the PocketDISH to my 942.
I selected the option to send video to the PocketDISH, which took me to another screen where I could select the shows I wanted to send to the PocketDISH. I selected my 2 year old sons favorite shows and WWE Raw which totaled 5 hours of video recordings and sent them to the PocketDISH which copied them down in only 30 minutes. While the files were copying over you could watch TV and you could see the status of the download by going to the PocketDISH screen from the 942.
After the copying was done I wanted to see how things looked so I unplugged the PocketDISH from the 942. It appeared that the 942 did some kind of firmware update to the PocketDISH as I was required to plug in power to the unit as it updated its firmware and rebooted.
Once rebooted I went to the Video Screen on the PocketDISH, I now had a new Dish Network folder where I found all my programs I transferred over. As a test I selected Dora the Explorer, my 2 year old son saw Dora on the screen and grabbed the PocketDISH out of my hands and went and sat in his bed and watched the entire episode! I place a pair of headphones on his head and he didn’t mind. When the show was done he gave me the PocketDISH back. I was happy that he enjoyed watching the PocketDISH as this was my main reason for getting the PocketDISH! My son likes to hog our TV in the bedroom; it is our hope that with the PocketDISH he can still enjoy his favorite shows no matter where we are and so far so good! I was amazed that he did not have issues with the headphones.
I got to sit down and watch WWE Raw, I was amazed how good the sound was! The PQ was acceptable, while the picture was grainy it was indeed watchable, and after a few moments I was able to ignore the pixels (or screen door effect) that I saw and watched the show. When holding the unit a foot and a half to two feet away I was able to enjoy the show, and while the 7 inch version would be better, the 2.2 inch screen was acceptable to me for watching shows!
Overall the main feature on the PocketDISH works and works well. For people only buying the PocketDISH to watch shows off of their Dish Network DVR’s they will like it, however for those looking to use other features like transfer movies from their PC to the PocketDISH might be disappointed.
While Dish and Archos have the DVR side of things down, they need to work on making a program for the PocketDISH which gives the consumer the same ease of use they get from the DVR side of things. Many people getting a PocketDISH might not be as computer savvy as others and the transferring and converting of files to work on the PocketDISH will be confusing to many.
I give the 2.2 Inch version of the PocketDISH a 3 out of 5 stars. Dish and Archos need to work to make this product friendly to everyone. They need to take a look at the IPOD and see how Apple made the product easy for all to use. If they could make software for the PocketDISH which made it more plug and play my rating would easily increase to four and a half stars out of five.
Archos also needs to work on its website as a lot of features such as games and firmware updates tell you to go to Archos.COM for more information, however when you get there, there is ZERO mention of the PocketDISH units. Even the games area has no mention of the PocketDISH.
Within the next week I am expecting a 7 Inch PocketDISH and I will also review that one and let you know how the 2.5 compares to the 7 inch model.
OVERALL RATING - 3 out of 5 Stars
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