I've had the HwS for three days now. So far this thing is amazing after the 722k. It is so much faster than my old box. Dish Anywhere works great so far, even though I have pretty bad upstream internet (usually a little less than 1Mb/s).
I really like scrolling through the guide on an ipad and find myself watching things I wouldn't have noticed before. Somehow the old blue 722 guide caused me to scroll toward the familiar, and the big expansive guide on the Hopper makes me snoop around more. I don't usually like things like "What's hot" but hitting that has already caused me to say "Oh, yeah...forgot about that" and watch something I wasn't looking for (hello there, Taken 2!).
Game Finder is really useful too. There are a few minor issues with it. It doesn't include French ligue 1 soccer, even though that's a big part of BeIn sports offerings.
But there are so many little things that they have fixed. Tiny gripes that they took the time to work out like being able to assign an aux speaker to the volume keys under "SAT" on the remote, so you don't have to switch back and forth if you have a soundbar or something. A tiny little issue but one that always seemed fixable...and they put a very specific menu option to do exactly that, so they must have been reacting to feedback.
The Music app is nice too. It saves me creating a separate guide for just the music stations.
Down the road I'd still like to see them make better use of the info window. Right now I'm watching a Mexican league soccer match, and the info cuts short before it gets to actually naming the teams involved even though there is a ton of empty gray space they could use. They still seem to have a hard character limit or something.
Setting timers is so much more intuitive and the options easier to get to, that programming things in order to avoid conflicts is a lot easier. You can see the conflicts more clearly and your options to move things around are way more obvious.
On demand is so much easier to search around. There are still issues with downloading by sat and waiting around, but it's so much easier to find things that I'll probably look ahead to the weekend and line a few things up every now and then. On the 722 I never bothered to try to navigate that mess of text.
This last thing may be wishful thinking or a mind-trick on my part, but I swear the picture quality on the HD channels seems noticeably better than on my old Vip722K.
This was easily worth the contract signing after I did the math on switching to D* and found that spread over two years, I was only going to save about $200-$250 total. This equipment is easily worth that.
