I have very bad news to report on not one but TWO different electronic products: the WDTV and the Flip camcorders. And sadly this is no late April Fools joke.
I already installed the new firmware that was released just yesterday on the WDTV Live Plus. After just a few hours of using the WDTV Live Plus with the new firmware, I can say I am very disappointed with the new firmware. First off, the keyboard bugs that existed in Mediafly and TuneIn Radio applications were NOT fixed with this new firmware. In addition, the characters that you enter into the Mediafly search box are no longer centered properly. So this is a NEW bug.
Also disappointing about the new WDTV firmware is that the text on YouTube and Mediafly below the picture describing the shows is in very very small text which is almost unreadable from even a close distance.
Finally on the WDTV, they did add one new Internet application, but it is not a good one. It is just CinemaNow which looks very similar to Blockbuster's application since the interface for both are pretty much the same. The main difference is that CinemaNow has full TV shows available besides movies, but like Blockbuster costs money. Too bad they don't get a service like Crackle which offers some free full length TV episodes. And with a device like the Roku player, there are so many more Internet applications available for it (100+!), but Western Digital's WDTV only gives us about a dozen. The WDTV's only strengths over the Roku in Internet applications right at the moment is Deezer, Facebook, and YouTube which are not included on the Roku.
Hopefully Western Digital will immediately put out a new firmware to fix the above addressed bugs and small text issue on YouTube and Mediafly, and that they will shortly add several more services to be more competitive with other machines like the Roku.
Now on to the second product that has very bad news. This time it is the Flip camcorders. I just learned that Cisco, maker of the Flip camcorders, is getting out the camcorder business. Apparently they have no interest in selling the Flip line to anyone else, which means that in the coming months the Flip camcorders will be no longer sold. Hopefully they will still carry the accessories for the Flip camcorders. But you just never know.
And what about the software support for Flip camcorders? Will Cisco continue to update software for the Flip after they stop making them? Your answer is probably as good as mine.
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