Digital Home Thoughts: The DVX-POD: Great Idea, Poor Execution

PVR Functionality: Recording Video
One of the cooler features is the ability of the DVX-POD to act as a PVR, but the concept is better than the actual execution. It has an input cable with composite audio and video connections, and it’s a simple matter of connecting your video source and recording it.


Figure 10: I connected the audio and video input ports on the DVX-POD to my laptop and played City of Heroes. It was cool to see the action on two screens. :-)

The DVX-POD can be set to record from 30 minutes up to 240 minutes, although actually starting the recording wasn’t intuitive and there’s no timer. Pressing record starts to display the video source, but you have the press the action button again to actually start the recording – there’s no visual indication that this is what’s needed. The recording quality isn’t very impressive – even the highest quality recordings I made looked pixellated and rough. I connected my laptop to the DVX-POD via S-Video as described above and recorded this sample clip. I'm not sure why the audio didn't record. :?

Battery Life
Battery life on the DVX-POD on paper is 12 hours of audio and 4 hours of video. How did it fare in real life? Fairly close to that. I didn't perform many tests, but in my casual use it seemed to last around that long for video. Unfortunately, it seems that when you power off the unit it doesn't shut all the way off – I left the fully charged unit on my desk for a few days and the battery was completely drained when I tried to power it on. This doesn't make sense to me – the device doesn't have alarms, so it doesn't need to be running real-time like a Pocket PC does. Something kept that unit in a suspended state of power, which eats up the battery.

Another frustrating factor is the lack of any real detail on the battery life remaining – there's an icon on the home screen that goes from full, to half-empty, to empty. How would you like it if your car was that inaccurate? I found that I was using it thinking I had 50% battery life, and five minutes later it was dead. More granularity is necessary.

Conclusion
If you've made it this far in the review, you'll already know what I think of it: from a hardware and design point of view, this is an impressive device. It looks fantastic, and on paper has impressive specs. When I was first sent a unit to review, I was convinced I was going to be buying one - it just seemed so perfect. But once I used it for a few days, I was equally convinced it was one of the most ill-conceived media players I'd ever used. It's like the designers didn't do any research to see what customer expectations are, or what competing devices are capable of doing. The user interface is horrible, the controls are awkward, and most unforgivable of all, it doesn't play the video formats it's supposed to. Look elsewhere for your portable media player: the DVX-POD is a dud.