Whilst Microsoft were demonstrating their new Windows Embedded Standard 7 media devices in private this week at CES, Haier had their prototype Windows Embedded Connected TV on show at their booth. At this point, no information is available on release dates, territories and pricing and from first looks it definitely appeared that there’s more development work required to get Windows running on the TV hardware with the kind of stability you need from a CE device.
Let’s take a look at the specs first. It’s a 55″ LED TV powered by an 1.6 GHz AMD Fusion Zacate dual-core processor. AMD’s Radeon HD 6310 video card is in support. The TV has 2GB DD3 RAM on board and a 1.8″ 16GB SSD for storage. The TV supports a full 1080p image and comes with 4 HDMI ports, plus 7 USB ports. That’s right, 7 according to the blurb next to the TV (it was difficult to see the rear of the TV as it was wall mounted).
The TV itself is beautiful, with a bright LED screen and not too thick a bezel – Haier have customised the Windows Media Center user interface a little, darkening the colour palette somewhat, and replacing the standard Windows Start Button with their own logo at the top left of the screen. A combined motion pointer/QWERTY remote is used to control the device, although the controls are quite clunky. Rather than control the mouse and click on a tile, you have to use the motion controller to control on screen Up/Down arrows which scrolled the Media Center menu – it needs some work.
The motion controller itself responds reasonably well, although you do have to ensure you’re pointing it in the right direction for it to work correctly – the Haier rep told me that in theory, the controller should work no matter the orientation, but right now, one direction works better than another.
Haier has added a range of additional content and widgets to the concept TV, including their own weather and news apps (in Chinese right now) as well as a number of games that were available in a new Games menu. Additional apps would be added in the future, I was told.
Unfortunately, during the course of the demo, the TV locked up. The mouse pointer disappeared from screen and Media Center crashed, leaving a couple of Windows dialog boxes behind. After a short delay, Media Center restarted, but at the wrong resolution. Oh dear. Still, it’s a prototype, right? Fingers crossed Microsoft get the Windows Embedded solution working with a bit more stability by the time the product ships.
