Being cheesed off paying 33 quid a month for my Sky HD sub. & only really watching the free-to-air channels I thought I'd ditch it & go for a Freeview box. Which? gave the latest Panasonic PVRs a glowing review so I bought a "Smart 1 TB HDD Recorder With Freeview Play", the latter offering a catch-up service so you could easily watch anything broadcast within the last couple of weeks. Except...on getting the box & connecting up I discovered this feature "Would become available in the future". Not impressed. still, never mind, it had the "Amazon Instant Video" logo on the box. Handy, because I'm an Amazon Prime customer. Except...no sign of the feature and no mention of it in either the instructions or anywhere else I could find.

Oh well, perhaps it'll arrive later via an update. Still, at least it advertises an App. for my iPad. Which is so incredibly poor it's risible. You can change channels to what's on at the moment, watch what you've recorded on the iPad (not on the TV) and, er, that's it. Takes ages to connect with the box. You can't watch what you've recorded from the TV guide screen, you have to go into another app. & fiddle about before you can find the recordings.

I suppose I could endure this stuff but SWMBO wasn't having any of it. So back it's gone to the South American river people. I did look at the Humax boxes but they're just not as good as Sky. The program guide and iPad apps on the latter are a work of genius, and coincidentally Sky have just announced a super-duper new "Q" box that does lots of clever stuff & incorporates umpteen tuners so you can record, IIRC, four channels simultaneously (not that I'd ever want to do so).

So back into the sticky arms of Mr Murdoch for me.