Handset horrors & programme guide
Reception seemed just fine - as we expected. Freeview, after all, is digital and thus an all-or-nothing system and we'd had no problems with reception on a wider range of Freeview products, as long as we'd used a loft aerial rather than a little indoor jobbie.
With the programme guide, you have two views of the available broadcasts. There's a channel-list view, as shown immediately below, where each channel has an ident logo. Then there's a by-channel view (shown below that) where you see a listing only of what's on one chosen channel - a mode you select by pressing the handset's red text button while in channel-list view.
Programme guide - all-channels view
Programme guide - single-channel view
You move through the listings by using the direction arrows on the handset's big silver multi-function button (hawk, spit!) and can jump forward and backwards 24 hours with the handset's fast-forward, fast-rewind buttons.
Pressing the handset's yellow button sets a timer recording for the active programme (yes, yellow equals record!) and making that selection changes the colour of the chosen programme to yellow, though you only see that once the selection moves to another programme.
[advert]You enter guide mode by pressing the handset's Guide button and press it again to exit - rather than pressing a Back, up or exit button. Outside of the guide, you can record what you're watching by pressing the handset's recording button.
Oddly, that button is red. Why Netgear didn't go the whole hog and make it yellow, we've no idea. Doing that would make as much sense to us as using the yellow button to set a timer-recording in the guide.
When you press the record button, you are offered the choice of automatic recording, which will end when the current programme ends, or manual, which only ends when you press the handset's stop button.
After a bit of channel hopping, our curiousity got the better of us and we switched to Channel 501 - the channel for the BBC's HD test broadcasts - to see if we'd get a blank screen (as with standard-def TV tuners and set-top boxes we've tried) or an error message.
We were seriously surprised to discover that, with the iplayer we were sent for review, high-definition reception was more than just theory - there was the picture in lovely high def.
Click for larger images (which still don't do justice
to the picture quality we saw from the BBC HD trial transmissions)
Yes, in our north-east-London office, the box was able to display - and record - the Freeview HD test broadcasts put out by the BBC from the Crystal Palace transmitter in south-west London.
But why? Hear our cynical take over on page four...
