Great news!
Amen to that -
I don’t know if our Canadian friends are familiar with “if momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” or not, but, well, married folks know ! LOL
Once I find a smooth way for her to use her phone or whatever to PLAY what she’s recorded to the TV I’ll be in cruise mode and she’ll be extremely happy.
Well, I’m happy with the product over-all anyway, just a few things would be nice when or where possible.
The only really “tough” part is playback and that is SO dependent on what you have and how you choose to do it, money spent and so on it’s a matter of finding the right combination based on what we have, our budget and what they do in the future.
I found setup extremely easy save for a few “what does this mean” or “what does this do” that’s not well documented but these forums take care of much of that. Average consumer - connecting to a network, well, when I see people hitting the power button on their computer monitor to restart their computer… and I’m not just taking an old joke from the Internet, it’s REAL, I see it at work every week… I do wonder about setup sometimes. Still, though, they have the setup really decent.
The quick start card was plain as it gets - unbox, connect antenna, connect drive, if you want to use Wi-Fi don’t plug in an Ethernet cable, power LAST. That was SIMPLE.
Even switching to my new 2T drive was easy once I had us watch the remaining shows we had recorded. We watched, I deleted, I exited/disconnected from the Tablo, I powered down my SATA/USB dock, removed the drive, disconnected the docking station, connected the new 2T drive, went back into Tablo (reconnected via PC) and let it format and off we went!
No hiccups at all - but I did make sure we didn’t record anything we weren’t able to watch before swapping drives (that’s a different discussion that’s all done with for a while ;-) )
Even me designing systems, building computers for use with high-end electronic control systems, implementing some of the very first PC touch-screens, building WANs and LANs, setting up servers, gateways, VPN and so on I still stumble with playing back our Tablo recordings.
I think if I once WATCHED someone do it, SAW it done, or there was a step-by-step I’d have it nailed (assuming the Tablo app worked well with Chromecast which I understand isn’t quite perfect yet but I suspect it will be much better really soon)
I think in the end my wife will love this thing. It’s small (she loves that part), low power use, can hold hundreds of shows, fairly easy to see what’s recorded and choose what to watch, can use with any TV in the house (well, eventually, got to buy more HDMI DEVICES for the other TVs so I can stream to them too.)
And I know it doesn’t run too warm as so far the Tonkinese have not tried napping on it. When I see one of them (or both!) laying on it I’ll know it’s running a bit warm. As of now they just walk past it (or over it) and pay it little attention (proving it’s quiet as well)
… I think the average consumer can definitely figure out how to use the Tablo. I’ve set up a few for others and they use it no problems.
I just don’t think the average user can set it up and get it working.
Yeah, I suspect you are correct there.