The Boxee Box Review

Booting and Strange Sleep Habits

Booting the Boxee Box takes longer than expected. I measured 65.1 seconds from full power off to the home screen, including automatically logging in via WiFi. Waking up from sleep is awesome though, the system is up and running within 1.5 seconds of hitting the menu button on the remote.

The excitement quickly faded though when I realized that sleep mode on the Boxee Box doesn’t actually save any power. Remember the current version of the CE4100 reference platform doesn’t support Suspend to RAM. While asleep the Boxee Box still draws 11.2W at the wall, virtually identical to its power draw while idle but awake. No wonder it wakes up so quickly, the box is still fully powered while asleep.

You’re better off just setting the screensaver to blank the screen rather than putting the Boxee Box to sleep.

Home Simplified Home

The Boxee Box requires a Boxee login to work. Thankfully Boxee doesn’t require any personal information, just a user name, email address and password. You can sign up via www.boxee.tv or on the Boxee Box itself. I already had a Boxee login but I couldn’t remember my password, which presented me with the first problem: there’s no way to recover your password from the Boxee Box itself. You have to hit Boxee’s site with a Mac, PC, smartphone, iPad or something else with a web browser to tell it you’ve forgotten your password. With my password reset, I was back to the Box.

The setup process is pretty simple. You adjust overscan to fit the Boxee desktop on your TV and that’s pretty much it.

Boxee on the Mac

The Boxee Box interface isn’t quite as nice as it is on the current Mac/PC release of the software. It’s a bit simpler, a lot less crowded, but it feels older. Personal preferences aside, the interface is well laid out and functional at least.

Boxee Box

The Home screen is, well, home to six major hubs: Friends, Watch Later, Shows, Movies, Apps and Files.

With the exception of Files, the hubs are designed to make Boxee more than just a dumb box that streams files off of the network. Remember this thing has an Atom based Intel CE4100 with more horsepower than you need for basic streaming.

Boxee views itself as a social device and as such there’s a focus on sharing content. You can follow other Boxee users and they can follow you. Shows you like will be added to your followers’ streams and vice versa. The Friends hub shows you the content your friends are currently liking/sharing/interested in.

The Watch Later queue is exactly what it sounds like. As you browse content (both on the web and on your own network) you can simply add it to the Watch Later list. It’s a useful way to reduce the sea of content available on Boxee down to stuff you can watch when you’ve got some free time.

The main event however is the next hub: Shows.