Early look at the Neuros LINK internet video box

12:45 pm PST • December 1, 2008

CG reader Shaila was kind enough to send in some early impressions and info about the Neuros LINK box that we reported a couple of weeks ago. Keeping in mind that Neuros is currently in a gamma testing phase and is offering a generous four-month, no questions asked return policy on the $300 pre-production units, it seems that the system currently consists of little more than a small form factor PC running Ubuntu off of a USB drive and using Firefox for the interface, according to Shaila.

In fact, it seems as though anyone can use the Neuros.TV interface with any computer to watch web videos. It’s all at http://app.neuros.tv/videos – I signed up for an account and was using the interface in under a minute. Other functions like playing local files and whatnot would be separate from the web video stuff, though.

One thing I noticed when navigating the web video interface at http://app.neuros.tv/videos was that videos basically opened within their normal web pages – not full screen. It appears that some of the video sites don’t support Linux yet, either. That’ll definitely need to be worked out eventually.

All in all, yes, it’s still a work in progress but Shaila decided to return her Neuros LINK box already. I think that the actual UI looks pretty nice but the hardware and the hand-off between the UI and the actual videos seem to need a fair amount of polish before everything goes live for real. It’ll be interesting to see how much the project improves between now and then.

Here are some more photos: