I decided to give Moxi a try when I got a new HD TV, and am still waiting on the TiVo Series 3 that will have HD support and more tuners (the two features I really want from TiVo).
I was ready to poo-poo anything non-TiVo, but although I much prefer the experience that I get from TiVo on my other TV’s, I now have a feeling that TiVo is dead. The other guys are catching up. Quickly.
Moxi has one feature that I really like. When you are in the interface there is space on the top right where the show that you are watching is playing. This is much nicer than TiVo which switches to the UI and turns off the screen and even sound from the item you are watching. They need to change that.
TiVo does win hands down on the stability and usability. With Moxi I often run into issues such as:
- Crash: While fast forwarding, the system crashes out of the show into the interface (so you need to find the show and resume
- Lag: The interface can become really slow to respond, as though you are on a browser hitting a server for every keypress :)
- Interface model: Moxi has a horizontal and vertical interface. You scroll horizontally to get to different menus that you can scroll vertically on. This breaks down a lot compared to the TiVo/iPod style menu system. The guide functionality is crap because there is no space for the guide (just a vertical listing). The worst is when you hover on an item that pops up something, you need to go RIGHT into that submenu which means that you can’t use RIGHT to go to the next item in the horizontal menu. You learn to hit LEFT to get out and then RIGHT RIGHT. Painful.
So TiVo is still ahead, but man they need that Series 3 out quickly, and a few game changing deals.
