State of the Art TV Anytime or Place: The Sequel
By DAVID POGUE The New York Times November 1, 2007
O.K., it's happened: we're officially old.
When you sheepishly tell your children that you used to have to watch TV shows by sitting down in a certain place at a certain time - well, you know you're old.
First came the TiVo and its ilk, eliminating the bit about sitting down "at a certain time." Then came the Slingbox from Sling Media, which obliterated the need to be "in a certain place." Later, SlingPlayer Mobile software for cellphones even wiped out the part about "sitting down."
Of course, the Slingbox isn't nearly as famous as the TiVo; you may not even have heard of it. In that case, saying that the new Slingbox Solo has a lower price ($180) than its predecessors and has built-in jacks for high-definition gear probably won't mean much to you.
In that case, a primer is in order.
The Slingbox's purpose in life is to transmit whatever is on your TV to your laptop or smartphone (like a Treo or Windows Mobile phone) across the Internet. The point, of course, is to allow people who travel - to another room, another city or another continent - to view all the channels and recordings that they're already paying so much money for at home.
It comes in handy when you want to watch TV upstairs, but your fancy high-definition TiVo is downstairs. It's also great when you're in a hotel room, bristling at paying $13 for a movie when your video recorder back home is a veritable Blockbuster. And Slingboxes are also a blessing when you are overseas and longing for the news, or the sports broadcasts, of your hometown.
There are a few other ways to perform a similar stunt, but none with the Slingbox's high video quality, super-simple setup and ability to display both recordings and live TV.
The new Slingbox Solo is tiny; its trapezoidal shape is meant to evoke the shape of a gold ingot, and it's now about that size, too (9 by 4 by 2 inches). That's about half the size of its predecessor, the Slingbox Pro.
...