Digital entertainer is a one-trick pony

NETGEAR, MAKER OF well net gear really, has come up with the EVA700. Labelled as a Digital Entertainer this unit's primary function is to stream the media stored on your PCs to your living room, over either a wired or wireless network, but to be perfectly honest I just don't see the point, but it is Intel Viiv verified so… no wait, I still don't get it.

The box is great big thing emblazoned in the traditional Netgear colours, if nothing else it would make for an impressive presence under the tree and exciting unwrapping.

Along with the unit, the box contains the remote, power cable, network cable, RCA stereo audio / composite video cable, installation CD and a few scraps of paper like an installation guide and warranty card. The unit is a sleek wide, slim metal box that will look at home in almost any home theatre setup. The remote is well made and feels good in your hand, although there is no backlighting so if you're watching movies in the dark you'll have to learn to use the remote by feel.

Setting up the EVA700 was pretty straight forward, most people will probably connect up with the standard composite video and stereo RCA, but there also Scart and s-video outputs as well as component video jacks for high-def output. There is also coaxial S/PDIF output for those with surround sound systems. Lastly there is the ethernet cable if you're going to be using a wired connection to your network. On the front of the unit is a 5mm headphone socket, which is quite unusual these days, and a USB port for connecting external data storage devices. Having the USB on the front is something of a mixed blessing, it allows easy access, but it means if you want to connect anything on a fairly long term basis you're left with the unsightly cables sticking out the front. Any attached device has to be FAT-32 formatted in order to be read by the device.

Setting up the wi-fi was something of a nightmare, only because you have to enter all the details using the remote, which means typing in letters like you would on a mobile phone. It also didn't help that the 'Caps Lock' button was the perfect frequency to change the channel on my TV, making it even more frustrating to enter the network passkey, but that's not the fault of Netgear. Of course, for all the hassle, you only really have to this once so it's not the world's biggest problem.

Once you've got the EVA700 up and running you'll need to install the Intel Viiv or Windows Media Connect software on your PC, which will allow to set up which files and folders are shared with the EVA700.

The menu is very simple and also very dull, you pick the PC or network device you want to connect to and navigate into the shared folders and select the file you want to play. It's all very easy and the thing that Netgear does have going for it with the EVA 700 is the massive number of supported codecs which include MP3, WAV, WMA, ACC, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF, GIF, MPEG 1, MPEG 2, MPEG 4, Xvid, DivX, AVI, WMV, M3U and PLS. One of my major peeves here was that it's impossible to play more than a single music or video file at a time without creating a playlist on the PC. Given that you search by details such as folder, artist or genre I would like to have seen an option to queue everything from that level without having to go off to my PC to create a playlist.

Should you get bored of your own media content there is also the option of hopping onto the internet to listen to internet radio and podcasts, and if your PC is Viiv enabled you can access the Viiv Zone, but as we've pointed out in the past this doesn't actually mean much.

One fairly major shortfall is that the power button doesn't seem to turn off the device, it just sort of freezes everything. This means that if you want to actually reset the unit for any reason you have to yank out the power cable and shove it back in, something that always makes me a little nervous, not to mention that it's not the environmentally friendly option to leave your eletronical goodies in standby mode.

In Short
My feelings on the Netgear EVA700 are somewhat mixed, on the one hand it looks good and it does what it says on the box. It can be a pain to get up and running, but once you're there it is nice and simple to use. On the other hand I have to question it's usefulness, I just don't really see the point. It seems like such a waste to dedicate this task to a single unit when so many other devices can do what the EVA700 does and more.

It's priced at around £150, but for a quid more you can get an Xbox 360 core console that will do the same thing and you can play games and DVDs on it as well, or you could spring for something like the iplayer we reviewed yesterday which admittedly is double the price but has so much extra functionality. ?