Portable DVR From Dish Is a Nice Idea but Needs Work

Archos has not done too well at this competition, however, and the Pocket Dish's lamentable interface -- on and off the screen -- suggests why.

To begin, the AV700E just has too many buttons, a dozen in all. Six of them can navigate through things on the screen, and two can select things in various modes-- and the navigation and selection buttons usually fall on opposite ends of the screen. The button that turns this thing on doesn't also turn it off.

The array of menus and status indicators on the screen needs editing just as badly. The software presents either too much information (how much do you care about the "bit rate" of the currently playing MP3 file?) or too little (its listing of TV shows omits dates, times and channels). Common tasks require too many taps of all those buttons and frequent waits: Shuffling a music playlist requires navigating to a sub-menu and selecting the last of five items there, after first waiting a few seconds for the player to read in the list of songs in that playlist.

Tragically enough, the Pocket Dish's effortless video-transfer capability somehow broke in mid-review. The Dish Network recorder stopped recognizing the player when connected, even though I could still transfer music and photos from a computer to the player.

The helpful Archos technician I reached at a toll-free number listed on the Pocket Dish Web site walked me through some troubleshooting routines but couldn't explain why the Pocket Dish player couldn't make itself known to the Dish DVR. So he suggested I call Dish Network. The equally helpful Dish technician I reached on my next call walked me through some other troubleshooting routines but didn't have any great answers to explain why the DVR wouldn't recognize the Pocket Dish player -- so he suggested I call Archos.

I can still applaud Dish Network's intentions, even if I can't endorse its implementation of them. It and other companies have time to get this right -- TiVo's plans to upgrade its TiVo ToGo software to add support for the iPod and Sony's PlayStation Portable could be a step in that direction.

In the meantime, Dish, TiVo, DirecTV, Comcast, Cox and other big providers of these video recorders are overdue to add a simpler but equally convenient video-sharing feature, one that doesn't require customers to buy $300 to $600 worth of portable electronics: Build a DVD recorder into every digital video recorder.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrob@twp.com.