Nokia Enters PVR Market

Daaelar writes "Nokia has just recently announced their entrance into the PVR market with the realease of their Mediamaster 260 S. It apparently has PVR capabilities as well as the ability to receive small images via Bluetooth for viewing on a larger screen, i.e. your television. It also includes some built-in games, as well as a feature to record from a digital camera or camcorder."

Hmm, so

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they a little bit worried about the way in which their indescribably inept, frankly insulting marketing campaign for the N-Gage might have alienated a large part of the exact same target market likely to be buying a PVR?

Knowing Nokia....

[Anonymous Coward]

It will be flashy but work poorly and if it somehow falls onto the floor it will break into 5 or 6 different pieces...

Re:Do one thing, do it well

[Dog and Pony]

Bah. Nokia was a tire (yes, those rubber thingys that goes on car wheels) company from the beginning. Their willing to expand into new markets and doing reasonably well is what has made it a succesful company. This is a much shorter leap.

But....

[burnsy]

But does the Nokia go the other way, from the DVR to my Nokia handset?

With my Windows Media Center, I have DVR functionality where I can transfer recordings directly to my Smartphone/PPC. I can also burn them to DVD for archiving. This is where MCE beats TiVo.

Convergance again?

[mhesseltine]

Wasn't this one of the problems in the dot-bomb? Haven't companies learned that it's better to be really good at one thing, and stay out of markets for which they are not suited, rather than be mediocre and lose money hand over fist? Not that I have a problem with companies trying to innovate, but I just wonder how wise this move is for them.

The important info - how many tuners?

[updog]

There's no information anywhere with the most important information about the box: how many tuners it has. You need more than one tuner, if you want to watch one program while recording another. And, I wonder if it has good electronic program info (with program information, times etc). The technical specs are extremely weak: System Resources * Processor: 32-bit / 166 MHz * Flash memory: 4 Mbytes * SDRAM: 16 Mbytes * Display: 720 x 576 * Colors: 256 You can't really do too much fancy stuff with a 166MHz processor and 16MB (!) of SDRAM.

I'll bite...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to buy a replacement for my VCR, but have been holding out for a few reasons.

1. If I'm going to get another device that has a TV tuner in it, it will have to be ATSC as well as NTSC (satellite ready would be nice, but not entirely necessary);

2. I'm not keen on additional charges for watching/recording TV (I'm already paying way too much for cable TV as it is). I have seen other Tivo like devices, but the quality has been lacking. RCA makes one, but it's from RCA. The Home-Theater PCs are way too expensive and the quality is worse than a VCR;

3. I'm not impressed by the current array of DVD-recorders that are on the market. See point one above. Also the quality of recordings is a joke. You'd think that for $600 or more it would be a leap ahead of VCRs in terms of ease of use and versatility.

I'm sticking with my old VCR. Doesn't care about macrovision or blue-coatings. Gives me just as good a picture as TV recorded on DVD at a fraction of the price.

What's a PVR?

[Makarakalax]

Ok, so I could probably find out what a PVR was easily by googling, but instead I'm going to make a suggestion and see what people say.

Why don't Slashdot stories have abbreviations surrounded by ABBR or ACRONYM tags? This way you can insert a title="Expanded form of Acronynm" inside the ABBR/ACRONYM tag and when you hover your mouse over the acronym (in browsers other than MSIE) a little tooltip will pop with the fully expanded acronym displayed!

In Mozilla ABBR/ACRONYMs are even highlighted with a special dashed underline to alert the user that this particular acronym can be decoded without the use of ones imagination.

Here's an example or two. [w3schools.com]

Sorry, no.

[WoTG]

I was thinking the same thing. But check here [nokia.com] for a list of countries where this PVR is currently available.

No Canada, or US for that matter. All European. I didn't see any specific reason why. Maybe it's a PAL/NTSC thing, or a patent thing, or simply an early stage of the product rollout thing. Too bad, it's a pretty nice looking box.

Forget Nokia, give me DIGA!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://panasonic.jp/dvd/index.html

This is Panasonic's PVR.

DVD recording, Compact flash drive, 160 GB HDD, max 212 hours of HDD recording.

This makes Nokia look like a lemonade stand ran by a bunch of snotty little kids.

Re:I'll bite...

[tessaiga]

I'm not sure I see what the problem is with replacing your VCR with a PVR. I'll try to address your first two points (I haven't looked into DVD-recorders, so I can't say much about the 3rd):

1. Your VCR also has a tuner in it. Assuming by "replace" you mean you're going to toss out your VCR and stick in a PVR, the total number of tuners you've got is still the same.

2. Why have a VCR at all if you're not planning to record TV? No one really buys VCRs anymore to watch movies on VHS; DVD's the way to go on that front.

What really bugs me about PVRs isn't the functions, it's the subscription model. Last time I looked into it, PVR manufacturers make you pay a "per-month" subscription or your PVR doesn't work. (One model I looked at had a "buy-out" option, but with a big up-front lump sum.) Given that you can get listings for free off the net, why can't it just grab listings from one of those? Or, alternatively, at least let me program in times and channels manually for free if I don't feel like paying for the fancy "one-click" recording. If I could get a VCR replacement for a reasonable price without having to add to my recurring monthly bills, I'd consider PVRs a good all-around replacement for VCR.

Re:Forget Nokia, give me DIGA!!!!

[Bushcat]

It doesn't review as well as the Sharp [sharp.co.jp], though the support for DVD-RAM is nice. Note, the Japanese-spec players tend to automatically delete stuff after 31 days to comply with Japanese copyright laws. But yes, any of these products make the Nokia distinctly an also-ran.

They made this years ago

[raynet]

The Nokia Mediamaster 9600 digital satellite reciever had SCSI connector. You could plug a HDD or PC to it and after OS upgrade (DVB2000) you had a perfect PVR which recorded nice MPEG-2 files without any stuped DRM etc restrictions. I just hope this new model allows me to burn those recorded show on DVD.

The specs I'd look for in a PVR

[Anonymous Coward]

Lemme know if it has these features:

-Funtional commerical skip (with an automatic mode).
-Network support (for streaming to AND from the PVR).
-Polished user interface.
-Reasonably priced tv-listings (or the option to function without).

*Of course, having an user upgradeable HDD is a bonus.