Micca Slim-HD: 1080p In Your Pocket
by Vivek Gowri on November 23, 2010 1:40 AM EST- Posted in
- Home Theater
- Micca
- Slim-HD
- Media Player
Micca Slim-HD - User Interface
The UI is another place where the Slim-HD feels cheap. It’s kind of unfortunate, the visual and physical interfaces are both kind of off, which kinda ruins the whole deal. The UI is clean and intuitive, a very straightforward menu system. The home screen is black, with 5 buttons - Videos, Music, Photos, Files, and Settings.
Files and folders are listed by alphabetical order, again just white text on a black background. It’s just a basic, boring, functional UI. Compared to the WDTV Live Hub, the interface lacks polish. I’m not much of a home theater guy, but here’s the kind of difference that I’m talking about: go look at an Android phone, dig down into the settings and menus. Compare it to the same menus in an iPhone or a Windows Phone 7 device. There’s a distinct cohesiveness and style to the iOS and WP7 interfaces that simply isn’t found in Android.
That’s kind of the feeling I get with the Micca UI, except even more so. It’s kind of jarring, it feels like a thrown together UI. It’s just plain, and in comparison to the much more visually jazzed WDTV Live Hub UI, somewhat ugly. If you look at the WDTV screens from our review, you’ll note that it’s basically the same menus, the same options. These aren’t radical UIs, there’s only so many functions for them to serve. But I think providing something more visually engaging than just a plain black screen is really a must, especially for a device that will spend much of its time plugged into large HD displays.
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abrar - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
i noticed that there is a Firmware download link on the Micca website, have you tested it ?and if so , have you noticed an appreciable difference ?!
jack@micca - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
I believe the test unit already has the latest firmware. We do release new firmware frequently, however, and hope to improve handling of less-than-popular encoding methods and parameters.Jack
blowfish - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
The look of the UI would be the least important aspect of any media player. I'm far more interested in media compatibility, so thanks for doing a throrough job on that. x264 support is high on my list of priorities. Personally, I have no interest in streaming media.The Slim-HD seems like a handy device to hook up to an hotel TV when you're traveling.
Rainman200 - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
Couldn't disagree more with you on that, the GUI is supremely important which is why Apple trounces many of their competitors.For far too long media players have had very poor GUI's designed by people with no UI experience or training at all. See the stock skin of the Realtek RTD1073 players.
Shouldn't have to be that way, we can have both.
jack@micca - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
I agree with you that the GUI is important. And to that point, I would say that the Slim-HD's GUI while not pretty, is functional, simple, and responsive. Sure it doesn't have fancy transitions, a movie jukebox interface, or movie cover-art/info displays. But if you take a look at the modern digital media player with such fancy interfaces, they are either very expensive, and/or have a lot of bugs.I am not saying a nice interface is impossible, but industry as a whole is searching for an efficient way to present the massive video collections that users have in some coherent user friendly fashion.
For us, usability is still the main focus for now. Future firmware versions will add a bit of eye candy to the various pages. But we will control such changes so as not to impact usability.
Jack
WingNutZA - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
Does the player need external AC power when you hook it up to a PC as a storage device or can USB supply enough power when you only want to copy stuff to/from the unit?jack@micca - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
No AC power is needed as this works as USB hard drive while drawing all the power it needs from the computer's USB port.Jack
mfeller2 - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
I checked the docs, and there is not the ability to copy files from an SD card to the hard drive. It should be a simple software change to add this functionality, and adds flexibility to let Micca address a different market. There are products for in-the-field backup for digital cameras. Plug in the media card to a portable hard drive, and media card contents are automatically copied to disk, to have a second copy in the case of media card failure. Smaller than a laptop when there are packing constraints (photo-journalism, nature photography). With newer digital cameras now supporting video, the ability to do this in-the-field backup, and then do playback from the Micca drive...it's a nice all-in-one package that does more than the dedicated photo-backup hardware, and cheaper to boot.Rainman200 - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 - link
The sochip SC9800 is definitely Arm based as there is a Chinese forum that deals with it used by Ainol players and someone hacked Android onto one of the PMP'sIf the rumors are true the Boxchip F10 is supposedly the same although why the different names is a mystery.
Pooki - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
I'd like to pick up the micca slim hd and pair it with a boxee remote. Combined, that's about the price of an AppleTV. Would it work, you reckon?