Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Well, by now I hope you have already seen our unboxing set that we posted yesterday, but now its time for a quick hands on review with the Roku Netflix Player.

First off the player is small, which may be good or bad depending on your setup. I say this only because it does take up very little space in your entertainment stack, but similar to game consoles and the AppleTV its another odd size device that you will have to make a place for. Lucky for us, we had a nice spot to sneak it in.

The setup was easy an process and the player comes with the remote, a power adapter and a set of cables to hook it up. The setup was simple, find an empty set of plugs on your TV, plug the cables into the TV and into the player, then plug in the power adapter. Just like that its hooked up, and now its time to begin the actual setup, which I am happy to say was just as quick and painless.

Once the player turned on you will have to hook it up to your network, with your choice of either a wired or wireless setup. I choose wireless, which aside from putting in my secret code was simple, well actually entering the code was simple, it just took a little extra time doing it with the remote.

After the player is on the network it then needs to do a quick restart and then its time to lock it to your Netflix account. That was, as the pattern makes it, just as quick and easy. The player will give you a code that you have to enter into your Netflix account using your computer, which once entered took just about a minute before I got the onscreen message stating that it was ready and the player was all set up and ready to use.

Total time from unboxing to watching a movie, maybe 10 minutes and it was easy enough even for non-geeks to handle. However this was where my issue began, with limited content it took me quite a bit longer than the 10 minute set up time to find something I wanted to watch. However once added to my queue, it showed up quickly on the Roku player, which was refreshing. I hit play and began to watch, and even on a Wi-Fi (older Apple Airport with a Road Runner 15Mbps) connection the playback experience was pretty nice. As expected the play and pause worked well, however trying to fast forward was just about pointless, but that I can live with.

Finally, the remote control is very basic, as you may have imagined it has only the minimum features, but similar to the AppleTV remote is serves its purpose.

Overall this is a device that I still want, plan to keep and hope to be able to use on a regular basis in the future. By that I mean, the Netflix Player from Roku is a great device for my needs, it does what it claims to do and it does it well, however there are currently only “10,000 movies and TV episodes” available from Netflix. Which means that there was a severe lack of something that I wanted to watch. Like I said before the device works well, but I would suggest to either pick one up and be patient for more content like myself, or give the “Browse Instant” section of Netflix a quick once over before you commit your $100.

Product [Roku] Product [Netflix]

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