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Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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4.5 stars
"best dvr/pvp available"
Pros: beautiful design, easy to use controls, excellent sound, terrific picture
Cons: lousy earbuds
Summary: Full user opinion
having used rover for 3 weeks for recording and watching movies and tv shows ( an average of 3 hours of viewing per day) and having had experience with many of the other pvp's on the market, i can say without any hesitation that rover blows away all its competitors. the design is totally sleek. the controls are along the edge of the very thin device which actually is pocket-sized (i carry it in the front pocket of my jeans) and are quite intuitive and easy to master [which i did because the manual wasn't available when i got my rover] the picture is superb in almost any lighting environment (according to everone i've shown it to which practically everyone i know). there is some pixelation but it is is not at all distracting. the use of sd cards is briiliant (although i must say that my rover only takes 2 Gb sd cards and not the new sdhc 4 Gb sd cards which i hope will eventually be possible). one card will hold 180 minutes of high video quality recording and as i always have 2-5 movies recorded to watch, i carry 6 sd cards (the price of 2 Gb sd cards has dropped in the last week from $90 to $40 and the cards are reuseable) so i purchased an sd card holder (since it is unwise to write on the sd card itself and a VERY bad idea to put a label on the card) it seems logical to me to store the sd card in its individual plastic case and to put the cases into a multiple sd card holder (that way you can label the individual card cases and keep a list of what's recorded on the card within - i found the targus sd cardholder available from amazon to be perfect for me). the timed recording is fine but you can only set up one timed recording at a time so i usually record my shows on my motorola hi-def dvr cablebox and then copy the ones i want to watch when i'm having coffee, attending a boring meeting, waiting for my wife to finish shoe shopping, onto my rover at my convenience (note that you cannot play a hi-def recording on rover so you should use the non-hi def broadcast if you want to copy it onto rover.. the included earphones are truly dreadful but one can use the earphones or earbuds of their own choosing (although this might require getting a $4.00 mini-to-micromini stereo adapter from radioshack. the sound quality is outstanding and i hear no background hissing. one feature that needs to be included in future updates to the software is the ability to mark the point where one has stopped viewing an sd card and to automatically return to that location when one wants to resume viewing. one important note. if you intend to use iTunes to download movies or tv shows over the internet [, it comes onto non-intel based mac computer as an mpeg-4 .m4v file and i have found no software to change the format into an .asf file to play on rover. but downloading movies from the internet is too silly an idea to bother with. you should have no problem copying a dvd onto rover using the composite video output from the dvd player.
some individual might find it silly to watch a movie on a 4" screen (almost as silly as on a 2.5" screen) but as a devoted videophile [with a 100" screen front projector home theatre and a 43" plasma tv] who watches 330 - 500 films a year, i have found movies shown on the rover are as absorbing as films shown on my bigger sets. the price of $350 for the wide screen is very reasonable and unless you're waiting for the forthcoming oversized archos 604 wi-fi enabled pvp [ if you are, you'd still be better off getting the roverTv and the nokia 770 internet tablet which i have], this is THE pvp to buy. my only regret is that i couldn't get it earlier (i had to wait for them to be produced),; also that CNET doesn't allow for ratings of 9.5 which rover deserves.
