Mkay. Gotta stop you there.
Have you seen any of the advertising? It is very very simplistic and give us in no way any idea of WTF this is or what it does! And then the 8 page setup guide with 95% of it being just pictures…
That aside, though, yes. There must have been some rush if the beta testers barely had a chance to play with it before it suddenly appeared on shelves. It’s also understandable that some rushing had to be done in order to get it into consumer hands by the ever-so-important holidays. Get it into some homes early, get it under the tree shortly after.
This seems to be a product that is hit or miss, and every day brings a different one of those. Today, I’m ready to bury one 2 feet under the icy snow, while I could kiss the other. Anything with technology can have its ups and downs, and with software, hardware and firmware constantly changing, every minute can bring different results.
But, there’s a huge community of people here that want to help. Just saying, “It doesn’t work,” isn’t giving anyone information on what they can do to steer someone in the right direction. But expecting an upset user to sit down with every detail from their Tablo, STB, app, router, network is asking too much (Sorry, @KimchiGUN , I know you readily give that and sometimes it’s too much and it makes me chuckle!) We’ve got to meet people in the middle and try to help. But they have to want it.
If my 3 months of this has taught me anything, it’s that we’ve all been disheartened by this product at one point or another since introducing it into our lives. It’s easy to throw in the towel and say screw it. It’s harder to ask for what to do about a problem than to complain. We all feel like we’ve tried everything we can to make it work.
There are some very smart individuals on this forum and I’m glad to have them here. They are the helpful ones that are always offering advice and saying, “have you tried _____”. And when I scream to myself and say, “Yes, thirty times!” I have to slow down and say, “Yes, it didn’t work. What else do you think might?”
Was this product ready for market? I would say mostly yes. Even within weeks of having my first 2-tuner, app and firmware updates would improve one aspect and break another. I don’t rely on Roku, so I had some better luck than others – but it was also a great backup when the Android app had a broken search function. There’s a ton of code in this and the smallest change can break an important feature. It’s got to be hard to know when to release an update. I’m sure TabloTV wants these malfunctioning apps and devices fixed more than we do! Some of us are just more stubborn than others and will spend two days on the simplest issue.
I sold one to my Mom, and I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t believe that even she could handle the quirks and other oddities that can arise. The live TV thing is a problem all around. Yes, the Android app handles the buffering better as well as the signal loss which I think freaks out the Roku version, but it’s not perfect. (I think it would play more smoothly if it didn’t automatically load other stuff at the bottom of the screen while paying live TV or a recording – too much is being asked of the device/RAM/HD at one time).
It’s not easy to spend $80-100 on a device that’s not working the way you want it to. But sometimes we buy something that has one purpose and want it to work a little differently, too. Programmers can only try to guess what a user will find most useful. I think this does an above adequate job. Today is just a day where one is being temperamental – I still think that double 2.2.48 update smacked my 2-tuners around! My 4-tuner is being easy-breezy but maybe tomorrow the roles will reverse. Only so many apps/devices/systems/setups can be accounted for and tested. Like it or not, in this day and age, we’re all guinea pigs.
It’s heartbreaking to see a user just come on to say “this is junk, don’t buy it.” But even more so when the information they could provide could help others, and of course, that others advice could help them.
