At first glance, the Reelbox resembles a high-end multimedia PC. It's large, with an impressive Germanic build quality that goes some way to justify the rather high price. The lower strip of the front panel gives you a row of playback-transport controls, and mobile phone-like 'smart' buttons that intelligently change their function according to what's displayed on the large backlit LCD panel located directly above. This screen is impressively detailed, and also displays channel lists and any onscreen menus that may be selected.
Sadly, the remote - which is superficially similar to that supplied with its closest competitor, the Dreambox - is still needed to scroll through lists. But there's more to the Reelbox than mere satellite reception, as the various intriguing buttons (PVR and DVD) on the remote suggests.
In the centre of the front panel is a DVD-ROM drive that allows the machine to play various types of disc media - one of the reasons for those transport controls. The Reelbox is compatible with DVDs (playback is multi-region), CDs and CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs containing MP3 music files. But unlike the average cheap DVD player, it spat out our JPEG photo disc.
Trying to play DiVX MPEG-4 content - something of which many DVD players are now capable - informed us that the 'appropriate plug-in' is missing. And that hints to the true power of the Reelbox. Like the Dreambox, the machine is based around the flexible open- source Linux operating system. New features can be added by firmware upgrades and application-specific modules (the aforementioned 'plug-ins').
The Reelbox contains far more computing power than most satellite receivers. Buried in its neatly constructed innards are an AMD Geode SC2200 CPU (which contains a 300MHz Intel Pentium MMX-compatible processor, various interfaces and 2D graphics among other things), a 350MHz Pixelworks Equator BSP-15 co-processor for video decoding and 128MB of SDRAM (expandable to 256MB).
More, more, more
Taking advantage of all this power is the connectivity, which is superior to just about any satellite receiver on the market. On the rear, you'll find a 10/100Mb/s Ethernet port for hooking up to your home network (an internally fitting Wi-Fi upgrade option is also available). We hoped that such networkability would have facilitated online upgrades à la Dreambox. But with the current firmware the only way of getting a newer version into the unit is somewhat more convoluted.
