November 14th, 2008 | permalink
The switch to AT&T U-Verse
We recently made the switch from the Dish Network to AT&T’s newest offer, U-Verse. I have noticed new utility boxes for the service popping up all over the area, mostly on street corners. They are the beige boxes with orange stickers with black numbers on them. After the boxes went up, representatives went door-to-door trying to get people switched over to the new service. One of our neighbors had made the switch already and were very happy with it. When the reps came to our door they gave us a ’special’ signup offer that sounded good. Faster Internet, no dish, more channels, better price. We scheduled the install and the U-200 service plan and the basic internet package. We are going to boost up to the Elite internet plan to enhance the speed.
The install went pretty good. Erika was home while the cable guy hooked us up. He was here about 4 hours, but other than that, the process from signup to hooked up went pretty easy.
There are a lot of benefits to the service.
DVR 4 shows at once
Rarely do we need this feature, but it is nice to have the option to DVR up to 4 shows at a time.
Channel that displays your Flickr photos
There is a channel that connects to your Flickr account and displays your photosets. Pretty cool, but it is faster just to pop open the laptop to look at my Flickr photos.
Free Flickr Pro account as long as you have the service
When I went to setup my Flickr account to sync it with my U-Verse account, I had to switch my Flickr login email address. It could have been a huge pain, but luckily I found a link to sync them.
Ability to schedule DVR events by internet/phone
This might be the best new feature. I can get into my AT&T U-Verse account online and check what items I have scheduled to DVR, change the schedule and add individual events. This especially comes in handy when you are out of town, or maybe stuck at work longer than expected and did not set a DVR schedule for something you thought you would see live.
Almost 1,000 On Demand Movies
The movie selections are pretty good and range in price from $2 - $6 and include the option for HD versions of select movies. (We still need the HD TV)
Picture-in-Picture Guide
While previewing what is on other channels, you see a small picture of the channel that you are previewing while the channel that you are on plays in the remainder of the screen. Very nice while watching to channels at once to know when to flip back over to the other channel. Not so good when your children see Sponge Bob pop up as you try to cruise past the kids channels.
Wireless Modem included
The modem that comes with the service is wireless.
Some of the drawbacks that I have noticed so far are as follows:
1 DVR
We have two televisions and one DVR. The main TV has the DVR attached to it and allows for all of the rewinding real-time shows and setting DVR events. The second TV in our bedroom just has the receiver box. No replay, no DVR events. UPDATE - To clarify, You can playback already recorded events, but cannot create schedules.
Have to learn new channels
Now we have even more channels, most of which are different than what we had previously.
Favorite channel list with guide a little lacking
With Dish Network I could create a few different favorites lists. I had one for the adults, one for the kids, one for music and one for sports. It made it easy to find what I was looking for. The U-Verse favorites does not function the same. You only have one favorites list and when you click on ‘guide’ all channels is the default. You have to press ‘menu’ and scroll to ‘favorites’ every time you want to preview your favorites. That gets annoying.
After a couple days of the service, I am pretty happy. We still need to unmount the Dish from our roof and send back our old DVR. I think there will be a lot of new features coming with the service including iPhone apps to control your scheduled content and possibly watching your content on mobile devices. i.TV already hints at these items. Maybe version 2.0 will come out soon.
