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Ten years of TiVo: how far we haven't come {Engadget}
Apr 29th 2009 12:23AM "The DTVPal DVR offers a $250, no-subscription, dual HD OTA-tuner solution for anyone who doesn't want to pay a cable company or Tivo a monthly fee. With the full power switch to digital broadcasts in June, it is a compelling sell for anyone who watches mostly network OTA TV or has other TVs in the house that they don't want to pay an extra fee for. If only the units had a better UI and were less prone to crashing.
If Tivo could come up with a similar offering for the same price I think they could push a lot of units out the door."
The Tivo HD does more now than the DTVpal and I got it on clearance for $100 less with a satifaction guarantee and a year longer warrantee than the dtvpal offers. I bought the TivoHD specifically so my wife and kids have an easy to use interface to work with. With a lifetime subscription assuming that the subscription is honored if tivo should fail if it lasts 5 years that will be less than $7/month. Less than $2/week to keep things simple, add netflix streaming (awesome!) plus ability to download to computers and ipods and I think it's a bargain.
I plan on dropping cable as soon as we clear the Brighthouse dvr we have now and in less than 7 months the tivo will have broken even for us so if it works for 7 months no loss.
Having the Tivo HD since friday I find it superior to the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD in almost every way except, why is it tivo can browse the guide while watching what's live but while going through recordings it's silence? The Sci Atlanta can browse recordings with a PIP of live tv so I know tivo could if they wanted to.
Many of the things that would make the Tivo more of a killer appliance would be giving the OWNER the choice of how you want YOUR tivo customized. Having the live tv channel on while searching for a recording may be what I want but may not be what lots of other OWNERS want.
A google / tivo alliance would be great.
Public service announcement - do not use the Internet on your phone when you are abroad {Gadling}
Sep 7th 2008 4:14AM Great advice. My sons drove the alcan a few weeks ago and roaming on Tmobile for voice was almost $5/ minute. Thankfully they listened when I told them not to use it much.
The Hotspot@Home didn't help as much as we had hoped. Most of the hotels they stayed at had wifi included in the room rate but required logging into an access portal that used flash, so even the blackberry curve couldn't use it. If you don't have the $10 T-mobile Hotspot@Home service your usage will come out of your plan minutes as if you were home UNLESS your phone should switch to gsm (default settings on most UMA phones is to automatically switch to the stronger signal) in which case international roaming should apply, but the billing system may not catch it. With the blackberry you can set the usage to wifi (UMA) only to avoid that.
Text messages can quickly snowball too. The cost for an international texting with tmobile from canada is .45/text unless you have a plan that includes texting. If you have a plan, each text is taken out of the "text bucket". I talked with several customer service reps who didn't know the details. The first (only correct one) said with plan it was covered like texts and pic messages within the US and if you exhausted "bucket" then the .45 rate would kick in. Not trusting one rep I called and tried to confirm with another and had more than one rep tell me all texts would cost .45. Unless the charges for text roaming takes longer to hit than voice, the bucket applies same as in US.
