Looks like the Boxee Box has finally been announced officially. It features a quite unusual design that I like and supports almost every possible video format you could think of. It’s supposed to go on sale in the first half of 2010 for less than $200. I really hope that they ship this one internationally. The only downside is that I see that it doesn’t seem to have optical output for sound, only HDMI.

Press release

D-LINK DEBUTS BOXEE BOX AT CES 2010; DIRECTLY LINKS INTERNET ENTERTAINMENT SERVICES TO TVs EVERYWHERE

Networking pioneer and popular entertainment software create the best way to get the free entertainment the Internet has to offer with no monthly fee

LAS VEGAS, CES Booth 36232, South Hall, LVCC, Jan. 5, 2010 – D-Link made lots of geeks and early adopters happy today by introducing the revolutionary Boxee Box by D-Link, winner of the CES Best of Innovations award in the Home Entertainment category.

The Boxee Box by D-Link reinterprets what TV should be. The Boxee Box delivers movies, TV shows, music, and photos from a user’s computer, home network, and the Internet to their HDTV with no PC needed. Additionally, Boxee’s core social features make it easy for friends to discover new content from each other through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Internet Entertainment
Boxee is a popular PC, Mac, and Linux software program that lets users watch hundreds of thousands of popular TV shows and movies. Instead of sifting through millions of confusing Web sites, when users search on Boxee, TV shows and movies are delivered to them with the click of a remote control. Nearly a million Internet users around the world have already downloaded Boxee to enjoy their online entertainment.

The Boxee Box by D-Link takes the same popular software and offers it up as a great device — the perfect companion to a high definition TV. The Boxee Box by D-Link provides access to more than just traditional TV content. It includes a huge library that spans the Internet, such as university courses, panel discussions, academic lectures, presentations, web-only videos and more from TED, Stanford, FORA.tv, Kid Mango, Next New Networks and others. Boxee also makes it easy for users to add their own favorite entertainment sources with simple RSS or XML feeds available for most online video.

In addition to video content, Boxee users can access great music from sites like Pandora, last.fm, shoutcast, and We are Hunted as well as stunning photos from sites like flickr, Picasa and Facebook.

Personal Entertainment
For entertainment lovers who have built their own collections of digital media stored on their computer hard drive or home network, Boxee automatically identifies their content and downloads relevant cover art, synopses, reviews, subtitles, lyrics and more. This feature turns boring files and folders into beautiful media libraries that make it simple and appealing to navigate a collection of favorite movies, TV shows, and playlists with a simple remote. Furthermore, the Boxee Box by D-Link has extensive format support (see below) which ensures that when users hit the play button, they get instant gratification, with no need to download codecs or drivers. Also, with built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi support, it can transfer files without delay and from longer distances within a user’s home.

Social Features
The Boxee Box by D-Link keeps people connected with social features to help users discover new content from friends, experts, and tastemakers.
The first step to discovery is sharing, and Boxee makes this easy by letting people recommend any playing content to friends. Additionally Boxee automatically uses recommendations from a user’s Twitter and Facebook friends so they can find new content and instantly enjoy it on the big screen. Since anyone can build on top of Boxee’s open App platform, users can craft their own truly custom experience by creating or downloading plug-ins, add-ons, games, and more.

“We are pleased to partner with Boxee and to be the first with such a ground-breaking device,” said Nick Tidd, vice president of sales of D-Link Pan America and vice president of marketing for D-Link North America. “This powerful device with its unique form factor truly leverages Boxee’s service and is the best way for consumers to quickly access the growing volume of Internet content, organize it and stream it to their TVs and home entertainment centers.”

“D-Link’s successful track record in bringing to market, award-winning digital home networking products, and its global marketing, distribution and channel sales capabilities made them a great fit for our first hardware vendor.” stated Andrew Kippen, vice president of marketing for Boxee, “The Boxee Box by D-Link gives consumers what they want – an easy way to watch Internet or personal entertainment in their living rooms with a simple set-top box that costs under $200 and has no monthly fees.”

The Boxee Box by D-Link is scheduled to ship in the first half of 2010 through the company’s vast network of retail and e-tail outlets, and at D-Link’s online store, www.dlinkshop.com.
Supported Codecs & Formats
Boxee can be used to play/view practically all common multimedia formats, including:

VIDEO:
Adobe Flash 10.1
H.264 (MKV, MOV)
VC-1
WMV
MPEG-1
MPEG-2
MPEG-4
AVI
Xvid
Divx
PCM/LPCM
VOB

AUDIO:
MP3
WMA
WAV
AIFF
FLAC
AAC
DTS
Dolby Digital
Ogg Vorbis

PHOTO:
JPEG
TIFF
BMP
PNG

About D-Link
D-Link is the global leader in connectivity for small, medium and large enterprise business networking. The company is an award-winning designer, developer and manufacturer of networking, broadband, digital electronics, voice, data and video communications solutions for the digital home, Small Office/Home Office (SOHO), Small to Medium Business (SMB), and Workgroup to Enterprise environments. With millions of networking and connectivity products manufactured and shipped, D-Link is a dominant market participant and price/performance leader in the networking and communications market. D-Link Systems, Inc. headquarters are located at 17595 Mt. Herrmann Street, Fountain Valley, CA, 92708. Phone (800) 326-1688 or (714) 885-6000; FAX (866) 743-4905; Internet www.dlink.com.

About Boxee
Boxee is the first “social” media center, whose free, downloadable software and enabled devices are changing the way consumers experience home entertainment. On a computer or on a dedicated device connected to an HDTV, boxee gives users a simple way to bring all their entertainment into one place including personal movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like Netflix, MLB.TV, Pandora, Last.fm, and flickr. Users can also share information about what they’re watching so friends can enjoy it too through legal sources online. Nearly a million people use Boxee to get their entertainment. Learn how you can join them at www.boxee.tv.

D-Link, Boxee Box by D-Link and the D-Link logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of D-Link Corporation or its subsidiaries. All other third party marks mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. Copyright © 2009. D-Link. All Rights Reserved.

User interface

Before getting the Hero, the only touch-screen phones I had tried were the iPhone and the Nokia N97. I really hoped that the Hero could live up to the iPhone that I couldn’t get. Just turning on the phone and seeing the screen, and going through the setup wizard showed that HTC had done a really good job with this phone. They have built a coherent look and feel to the entire experience, called Sense UI. In my opinion, Sense UI is very intuitive. Most functions can be found where you’d think they are. The user interface is really polished and professional looking, unlike the N0kia N97 I had tried earlier.

The initial firmware supplied with the phone was a bit laggy, especially when running many applications. One of my biggest surprises when I moved to Android was that there wasn’t any kind of task manager to kill apps with. Fortunately, there are several applications in the Android Market to help out with this problem. The one I liked the best was Advanced Task Killer Free. It allows you to check applications that you want to kill and then kill them with one tap. The Task Killer remembers which applications you have previously selected, so once you have selected the apps you always want to keep running, you can quickly just tap “Kill all selected apps” and have all the unnecessary apps shut down.

A firmware update came out later and made the phone significantly faster. It eliminated animations from some widgets, like the default clock/weather applet, but made the Hero much more pleasant to use.

What impressed me the most during the setup was that by entering my Google account details, the phone had set up all my contacts and calendar events. Even the correct internet APN was provided,  so I could get to surfing immediately. By entering your Facebook login information, you can have the phone match your contacts to Facebook friends and pull their photos to your contact list.

HTC has extended the number of home screens to seven. All home screens are completely customizable with widgets and icons. Comparing this to the iPhone makes the iPhone’s static grid of icons seem very outdated. For example, my home screen shows me at a glance the time, weather, next calendar appointment and shortcuts to my most used applications.

Browser

The browser on the Hero is WebKit based like the iPhone’s Mobile Safari. This, along with the same screen size, makes most iPhone web apps, like Facebook, work flawlessly on the Hero. Unlike most other Android devices, the HTC Hero has multi touch support with the familiar pinch-to-zoom gestures. The browser is fast and really makes it possible to view full web pages on the phone. Even though the Hero has Flash-support in the browser, it makes browsing a lot slower. This is because most of the Flash content on web pages is ads that don’t add any value to the content. By turning off the Flash plugin from the settings menu, the browser becomes even faster.

Google Maps

Another essential application in a smart phone is the map/navigation app. Google maps works very well on the Hero, even though it still seems to miss a couple of features. One of the missing features is the multi touch support that is used by most other applications on the phone. By not supporting pinch-zooming, the application feels out of place on the phone. Google maps does not either take advantage of the compass in the Hero to orient the map.

What I really miss from Google Maps, though, is navigation support. I hope that the rumored Android 2.1 update will bring navigation support also to the Hero (and to Finland).

One of the uses of Google Maps: finding food.

Email

The Hero comes with two mail clients, which is kind of confusing. One mail client is the default Android Gmail client. In addition to that, HTC have supplied an own email client that supports multiple mailboxes. I needed my phone to check all of my email accounts, so I chose the HTC email client.

In order for the client to display HTML emails, I had to change the maximum message size limit to more than 5kb (text only), which was the default option. I also had to disable Android’s Gmail syncing as I would get two notifications for every Gmail I received.

The mail client itself is quite nice. It displays HTML emails in the same way the browser would, and supports multitouch gestures. It allows you to choose how much mail you want to automatically download and you always have to manually download attachments, so there is no risk that the phone will start downloading huge attachments by itself.

Calendar

The calendar on the HTC Hero uses Google Calendar and automatically syncs events to and from Google Cal. By default, however, it uses a local calendar for some reason. I found it easiest to just hide the local calendar and use my Google calendars instead.

The Calendar application shows each different calendar with the same color coding as on the web. This makes it very convenient to have shared calendars and set up meetings from your phone that will automatically be synced to all those you share your Google calendar with.

Syncing

Syncing the Hero is dead simple. All you have to do is add a contact or calendar appointment, either from the phone or from the web and they will automatically sync over the air. This was a huge improvement form my previous Nokia and Windows Mobile phones that required manual syncing. In my experience, manual syncing = no syncing.

Other applications

There are also a whole lot of other smaller applications included in the phone. The phone will always stay logged on to Google Talk, which is a handy and cheap alternative to SMS for those who have your gtalk username.

The SMS/MMS application collects all messages to one person into a chat-like thread. It makes it simple to keep track of the discussion even if it has been a while since the last message.

Another nice touch on the Hero is that all communication with a contact can be seen from their contact page in the contacts app. It lists all messages and email correspondence you’ve had with that contact in one easy to find location.

In addition to all these apps, you can choose and install from tens of thousands of applications from the Android Market. You can see some of my favorite apps in my earlier post.

Build quality and battery life

The biggest weakness of the Hero is the same weakness that plagues all large-screened smart phones – battery life. During normal use, the battery lasts about a day and a half, but in real life you will want to charge it daily. On a positive note, I’ve never had the battery die on me during a day of usage.

The build quality of the device is fairly solid. I have still not got any scratches on the screen, and the screen stays easily clean as it is oil-repellant. A minor complaint about the build is that the back cover gets a bit loose after being taken off a few times. It squeaks a little if pressed near the volume button.

It was also nice to notice that iPhone headsets worked on the Hero, allowing me to both talk and control music.

Conclusions

I can honestly say that this is the best phone I’ve owned. Even though I got it because I couldn’t buy an iPhone, I’m more than happy with my choice. I wouldn’t trade it for an iPhone anymore, it offers me much more functionality and I like the openness of the Android plattform. Even though the phone is starting to get old in gadget-years, I can easily recommend that you get one if you find one cheap.

A year went by and the iPhone finally got 3G capabilities, like all the other phones many years earlier. Not only that, the iPhone now had the possibility to use and install third party applications. Watching Steve Jobs’ keynote on the device, I thought to myself that this device would probably again be limited to the US. To my great amazement, Jobs announced that the device would be available in many smaller European countries, Finland included!

At this point I was ready, my wallet in my hand, waiting for the phone to come out. But then disaster struck. Not only did Apple export their device to Finland, but along with it they exported the completely incomprehensible way of selling phones locked to carriers. There had never before been a phone that I couldn’t buy without a contract. The custom in Finland is that people can buy the phone they like, and then choose a carrier that suits their needs. The system works very well – Finland has among the cheapest cell phone rates and best coverage anywhere in the world despite being more sparsely populated than the US. Buying the phone separately also allows people to freely buy new phones when they come out and keep their existing phone number and services without interruptions.

Sonera was, and still is, the only operator in Finland that sells the iPhone. They are notorious for having the most expensive calls and text messages of any operator, in addition to the premium price of the iPhone. For example, changing from my existing provider would have meant that I would have paid 9.90€/month for 384kbps maximum 3G in stead of 9.90€/month for 2Mbps 3G.

I started looking at options. Some European countries, like Italy, had managed to coerce Apple into selling the device unlocked. Many Finns that were in the same situation as me, unwilling to sign a 2 year contract with Sonera, decided to import the devices themselves. The phones worked fine, but the problems started coming in as they began to break. The European Union dictates that the warranty of any product sold in the EU is valid in all other EU countries that have that product for sale. Despite this, I read several horror stories on forums about how people had tried to get Apple to fix their broken phones, but had got rejected. A few determined people decided to push Apple on the issue and finally got their phones sent for repairs. In some cases the phones came back operator locked to the countries from where they were originally purchased. The clear picture here is that Apple does not want to have their phones sold unlocked, even at full price.

After going through my options time and time again, I realized that I had in essence 2 options:

• Pay almost 800€ for an unlocked phone from Italy without a working warranty
• Sign a 2 year contract with Sonera and pay significantly more for the service I currently had

Since there really wasn’t an option that was acceptable, I decided to look into alternatives. Nokia had released the N97, which based on reviews and my own short tests proved to be a total failure, and was out of the question. Another alternative was the HTC Hero. Even if the first reviews complained about it being slow, I could see potential in the phone and finally decided to get one.

I have to say that having used Android for about 5 months now, I really couldn’t even think of owning an iPhone anymore. What Android lacks in esthetics it more than makes up for in functionality. Sure, multitasking makes the phone a bit slow at times, but having to close applications when switching between them is really not an answer for that. I like the fact that I can have a chat program on in the background, listening to Grooveshark while still being able to read emails when they come in.

What really excites me about Android as a platform is its openness. Unlike the iPhone App Store, anyone can have their application added to the Android Market. In the long run, with Android gaining a bigger market share, I can see more and more of developers switching to Android as their main platform. The risk of developing an application for the iPhone and not getting it approved to the App Store will surely make many developers choose the the open platform with the larger growth potential first.

Me not getting an iPhone because of Apples policies was annoying, but the big issue here is that Apple has most likely shot itself in the foot, allowing Android to take over a market that the iPhone once dominated. Google has clearly also noticed this and will be selling their upcoming phone without contract to those who want it.

Interestingly, the agreement text hints at international shipping. If the device shipped to Finland, the price would be 370€ + 22% vat, totaling just over 450€. That would still be a very competitive price point, as Nokia N900 is selling for almost 600€ and other Android handsets at almost 500€. The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 with similar specs is available for pre-order for 750€.

It will certainly be interesting to see if the phone is sold directly by Google, and if it will actually be an European version with the right charger. If the phone is sold through third parties, the price will probably be right up there with the X10 at over 700€.

The weird thing is that the pixels do not seem to be stuck, they are only purple against a darker color. The dots are invisible when viewing a menu with a white or yellow background. I’ll have to take the camera for warranty service, but I was interested in hearing if anyone else has seen these types of dots and might know what causes them.