More on the recent WDTV situation and Flingo

Recently, I mentioned that I was very disappointed with Western Digital's WDTV Live Plus Firmware upgrade they released earlier this month.

Well after waiting over a week now for another firmware upgrade to the WDTV Live Plus machines, I am sorry to say that it is like nothing has changed. After using the WDTV Live Plus with the latest firmware some more, just about every Internet application I use seems to have bugs dealing with the keyboard. It is frustrating that we have to wait a month or longer between firmwares when keyboard functions should be easily fixed. And it seems like with these kind of bugs that are easily found, that one would get the impression that the Western Digital people do not use the products themselves or else they know about the bugs and are not capable of fixing them on their own.

I have recently tried to become familiar with Flingo. This is actually a good service on the WDTV Live Plus... if it was actually supported! With Flingo, you can go to a website and by clicking a button on your web browser, it will play the video on the WDTV. This sounds very useful, right? Well actually it isn't because Flingo will only allow you to do this with YouTube video pages which you can already watch on the YouTube application on the WDTV machines. The only advantage that I think there might be is that the resolution seemed to be better by flinging the video than by watching it through YouTube. If they had Flingo for websites like CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, etc., for example, you could watch episodes of recent shows on your TV by clicking the Fling button on your web browser. But that will unlikely ever happen. In fact, recently CBS and their video clips have actually disappeared from the Flingo application on the WDTV. Maybe CBS didn't like the deal they were getting from Flingo.

Finally, I did want to mention that I tried my USB Hub and it appears that it works with multiple USB devices. But Western Digital seems to not be really acknowledging that it works now and leaving their users in the dark as usual.

Hopefully in the future Western Digital will do a lot better job fixing their bugs, increasing their low number of Internet applications, increasing the usability of their exisiting applications since some could be improved greatly, and finally do a better marketing job for these machines.