Buy Now...

Firstly it is a very good and easy to tune Freeview box, it is 31x20x5cm with cables inserted. The front of the unit has three pin hole LED's red, green and yellow. The red is on when power is connected to the unit, the green comes on when turned to a digital TV or Radio station and the yellow comes on when there is email waiting to be read. The front also has the infra-red receiver for the remote control and wireless keyboard.

The right side is blank, while the left side has a USB port and a couple of card slots as not all Freeview channels are actually FREE. The rear has two SCART sockets, power input, line out, digital out, aerial in and out and input for phone connection.

See also: Freeview

more

By now you will realize this is no ordinary Freeview box. There is no manual and that I think is poor, what you do get is a folded A4 sheet giving four sides that do not do a lot to help as the resolution of the illustrations is not brilliant.

However if you get as far as point '7' then everything should be okay as by now you have an image on your TV screen and from there on things are explained better.

The autotune is quick and efficient it found 53 TV channels and 22 radio stations, they are shown in one list TV in blue and radio in yellow. As stated there a couple of companies that sell reasonably priced subscriptions to a number of the 'non free' channels and the card slot will be of use here, something I have not seen on other Freeview boxes. Channel '0' is a TV guide - seven days of programme details - that does not cost anything and it is updated via your aerial. You can find what you want and then either watch or set it up to record - providing you have your unit connected to a video recorder - you then of course must program your video recorder but it's a good halfway house for video recorders that would otherwise be of little use when Analogue is switched off.

So far only a few enhancements over a standard Freeview box but here it gets clever should you plug it into a phone socket it can connect to the outside world, you can send and receive emails - hence the supplied wireless keyboard - and more even the Internet. I am told that the box runs a Linux variant.

The USB socket can be used to turn the unit into an MP3 player or viewer of images. Here is where the 33 key remote comes into it's own so you can navigate via the menu key to the Multimedia sub menu. I found it rather iffy over the various brands of pen drives and stick drives some it would read others it would not, however I found it would also read a USB card reader and that means you could take your image card direct from your camera and insert it in the card reader in the USB port and view your images on your TV. This is something I have not seen anywhere else. I am told - but I did not try it - that the iPlayer+ can be added to a network.

The iPlayer+ is available from www.iplayer.co.uk for £89.99 or from their dealers and this price includes the iPlayer+, power cable, SCART cable, aerial extender lead, remote control and batteries, phone extender cable and splitter. If only they included a manual.