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.

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.

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.