Monday, 27 October 2014

Thanks a lot Amazon Appstore!



Thinking of using Amazon Appstore Apps when taking a flight? Not without a net connection you won’t.

Not much to say on this, quite some time ago they used to work offline, then suddenly all the applications were updated, and now if something works offline or not, is a hit and miss affair, depending largely on when one last used an app.

Considering these are meant to be MOBILE device apps, this is just plain stupid. As I said in my raison d'ĂȘtre for this blog, you can’t win and you as an individual matter little to a large commercial organisation.

BT YouView Box, what a heap of junk.

What I told BT recently:-

The Youview box has an awful and slow interface, is this a Beta version still going through testing? As it stands this is one of the worst set top boxes I have ever used, not worth the £42 (one of charge and postage) I paid for it. Compared to the Sky+ HD box I have (but no longer have a subscription for) it has several failings:-

1. Accessing recording requires a minimum of 5 key presses, this is just one or two key presses for most other set top boxes, e.g. the Humax Foxsat HDR and my Sony RDR HXD910 only require ONE button press to access recordings.

2. The Youview button's default option is nonsensical, i.e. it defaults to "Guide", yet if one wanted to access the "Guide", all one has to do is to is actually press the guide button! It just adds a step in accessing recordings.

3. The record what you're watching feature is a mess, offering a 'partial' recoding, which is a needless messing up of the feature. It obviously starts caching when it is turned on or the channel is changed, as one can pause or rewind to the this point, but one is only allowed to record from when they press the record button. A daft solution to this is to press the record button as soon as one changes the channel or when it's powered on. Why the firmware isn't set up to do this automatically, like the Sky+ HD box is not obvious.

4. The BT Vision, and iPlayer handling is so painfully slow, I'd say its borderline unusable. My Mac Mini which is a good number of years old does a better job of Internet based video content playback. My Sky+ box, albeit not as flexible as a Mac, again has menu handling that is lightning fast compared to your Youview box.