Apple TV - a big step in integrated technology

This square device is 20 cm long, nearly 3 cm high and weighs 1 kg with a 6-button wireless remote with the same iPod Nano design and 40 GB internal hard drive. Phil Schiller, vice president of "Apple", called this $ 299 product: the DVD of the Internet era.

Apple TV is a signal conversion device used to play digital content from any Mac or PC (compatible with Mac OS X v10.3.9 or Windows XP SP2 or above) using iTunes on the device. Large screen with high resolution (EDTV or HDTV). To connect to TV or other audio or video devices, Apple TV uses HDMI port or component port. That means the user's TV must have one of these two ports. In addition, the device can connect high-speed wireless to home computers through the IEEE 802.11b / g / n standard.

Flexible connectivity is the strength of Apple TV because it allows users to use cable or Wi-Fi to connect between 3 devices: computer, Apple TV and TV. However, sometimes Apple TV will not detect wireless links by itself, forcing users to adjust themselves. Once the connections are complete, open iTunes and Apple TV will appear in the device list. Now there will be many options such as watching new movies, recently purchased movies or setting up Apple TV to automatically update library changes. At that time, everything will be stored on your 40 GB hard drive.

In addition, you can watch movies directly from other computers without wasting space on your hard drive. This would be perfect if there were many home computers or a computer but the movie capacity was too much for the capacity of Apple TV.

Apple TV works well with newer TVs from well-known manufacturers. The image quality displayed during the test is quite nice, but the colors are slightly dark and thin even in the color-filled frames.

Apple TV can play music with the ability to store up to 9,000 songs. However, the music will be stopped if switched to browse other parts. In addition, Apple TV also allows listening to radio and viewing high quality photos.

Although there are many limitations in functionality during use, compared to most similar devices that were released before, the Apple TV is a big step forward.