Don’t ever say Boxee is to be a little different. The Boxee team has taken it’s XBMC beginnings, private equity money and bold thinking to shake up the somewhat geeky tech media market with their Boxee product. This week the Boxee Box “aka extender” gets priced and today they announced a unique remote control to go with it.
Boxee Box Gets Spec’d at CES
The Boxee Box is already a mostly-known entity after it’s unveiling last month. But this week we get the rest of the details – in particular pricing:
- D-Link is the hardware manufacturer
- It’s pretty small and a little unusual looking
- Cost will be under $200 (read $199.99 MSR)
- Format Support = DivX, VC-1, H.264, WMV, MKV, Flash 10.1, Mp3, WMA, AIFF, FLAC, AAC, DTS, Dolby, Ogg Vorbis, Jpeg, TIFF, BMP & PNG
- Integrated Online Services include: Pandora, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Picasa
- Add-on apps bring many other niceties including Hulu
- Remote will be different – read below for more
Boxee Box Remote with QWERTY keyboard
Now Boxee is showing off their new remote with a keyboard. It certainly is functional, but to me is like holding a calculator upside down and using it as a remote control. I mean I’ll be hitting text keys constantly when I pick up the remote – it’s bound to happen!
I might be in the minority on this view as Mrs GeekTonic whom I expected to agree with me thinks it’s a great idea… She did say it would be nice if the keyboard were hidden with a slider-type covering since it isn’t needed most of the time, but she (and I) like the idea of being able to easily type in text for searches and the like without pulling out a full-blown keyboard.
What do you think of the handheld keyboard er remote?
More on the Boxee Remote at the Boxee Blog
