gdgt

The Boxee Box just isn't polished enough to be worth the hassle right now. The ideas are all there, and our experience with the Boxee team has us confident in their vision and ability to execute, but the Box ... feels like less of a finished product than an excellent rough draft of the future.

The ability to gracefully handle local content and the awesome remote control are two more reasons make the Boxee Box worth its money alone.

Boxee Box isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot more polished than Google TV and I can’t find any deal breakers or even significant downsides to delay your purchase. If you’ve never used Boxee before or are coming from a WD TV, Popcorn Hour or even an Apple TV new or old, you’ll absolutely love it...

Boxee is tackling an admittedly very difficult problem. Make it too easy and the content owners will crack down on you. Make it too difficult, and you end up with a platform that’s unsellable. At a high level, I believe Boxee has come very close to the perfect balance between the two extremes.

The Boxee Box by D-Link has some innovative design choices and a promising user interface, but mainstream content is mostly missing in action until future firmware updates are available.

Less expensive than the Logitech Revue with Google TV and pricier than Apple TV, the Boxee Box by D-Link focuses on rounding up Web content on your HDTV, but suffers from a lack of partner content at launch.

Even with a new software update, I found Boxee more confusing and geeky .

Add in its interface quirks and the poor quality of so much of the available video, and you’ve got an attractive but nearly useless piece of TV room furniture.

Boxee's greatest strength is its versatility.

It has a nicely designed user interface, it can be extended by apps/channels and it plays a ton of popular file formats.

If you know your stuff, the Boxee may be for you – but this is no device for novices

When the bugs are ironed out and even more content is available, this will be the media streamer to beat – not least because the hardware is terrific. But it comes at a price. And that price is, very sadly, far too much – especially when you consider just how annoyed the software will make you.

We were content to grind our teeth and accept the occasional crash and hiccup when Boxee was merely a freebie download for the PC, but after shelling out $200 for a set-top box, Boxee engineers need to get serious and learn how make Boxee work like the appliance it’s being sold as.

Right now, get the Boxee Box only if you're reasonably tech-aware and willing to put up with quirks to get more features.

The Boxee Box is a device with great potential. Solid hardware with feature packed software that needs time to mature.

The drawbacks of the Boxee Box and its $229 suggested retail price just make it impossible to recommend it to any one other than the hardest core home video enthusiasts.

All in all, I like the Boxee quite a bit, but I think it still needs some work as far as providing the apps that a lot of people really want (Hulu and Netflix) so that they can dump their cable or satellite box.

For me, the Boxee Box is simply too good to pass up.