Home Cinema

Reviews & hands-on

• Home Cinema 4 out of 5

  Popcorn Hour A-400 review

  By Ian Morris 16 May 2013

  There was a time when the Popcorn Hour was THE media player to have. Not only did it do everything, it also managed to produce excellent quality pictures and sound. In recent years though, things have become much more competitive in this media playing...

• Home Cinema 4.5 out of 5

  Technomate TM-Twin-OE review

  By Ian Morris 10 May 2013

  There was a time, back when Pocket-lint was still in school, where satellite TV was just about the most exotic technology you could use. If you ever got to go to someone's house, who had a massive dish and analogue satellite receiver, you could access...

• Home Cinema 4 out of 5

  Humax HDR-1000S freesat with freetime review

  By Ian Morris 6 March 2013

  Since freesat launched, it's been assaulting our eyes with its capital letter - or lack thereof - lunacy. Now, with freetime, or, as the firm calls it we've got some angled brackets thrown in for good measure. What is this, algebra? But horrors of English...

• Audio 5 out of 5

  Sonos PlayBar review

  By Stuart Miles 4 March 2013

  The Sonos PlayBar is the company's latest speaker and one designed specifically to sit under your TV. But does it work, should you bother, and what's it sound like? Pocket-lint has been using one in our home, watching as much TV as is healthy, to find...

• Home Cinema 5 out of 5

  Pure Avalon 300R Connect review

  By Ian Morris 2 March 2013

  Selling your very first Freeview set-top-box in 2012 is the move of either a company that knows what it's doing, or the move of a company so adept at missing the boat that it has evolved into a fish to avoid further boat-missing agony. The Pure Avalon...

• Home Cinema

  Sony Personal Content Station (PCS) LLS-201 pictures and hands-on

  By Mike Lowe 26 February 2013

  Personal storage is often back-breakingly boring, but Sony's managed to hot-up the solution with one-touch NFC connectivity from its 1TB wireless server. Okay, so it's not totally hotted-up as the "Personal Content Station LLS-201" - which we'll refer...

• Home Cinema

  Huawei MediaQ pictures and hands-on

  By Rik Henderson 26 February 2013

  As well as phones and tablets, another type of device has drawn significant crowds during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year: the Android-rocking media hub. Samsung has its HomeSync device, which sports a 1TB hard drive and can stream media...

• Gaming

  Hands-on: LG shows off 4K UHD wireless streaming from phone to TV at MWC

  By Rik Henderson 25 February 2013

  In among the numerous handsets, old and new, that LG has scattered around its Mobile World Congress stand this year is a rather impressive tech demo - one that tips a nod at the possibility for home gaming in the future. LG has a concept technology that...

• Phones

  Samsung HomeSync pictures and hands-on

  By Rik Henderson 25 February 2013

  Samsung has demonstrated its HomeSync device at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and it's hard to nail down exactly what kind of technology it is. It's a media centre, network storage solution, media server and home content and files hub all in one...

• Home Cinema 5 out of 5

  Roku LT review

  By Ian Morris 21 February 2013

  We liked the Roku 2 XS, but we didn't absolutely love it. Things have moved on a bit though, and the company offered us the chance to look at its LT model. It's technically a little less hardcore than the 2 XS, but it costs half as much - about £50 -...

• Home Cinema 4.5 out of 5

  Marantz NR1603 review

  By Hunter Skipworth 15 February 2013

  Getting enough oomph from your home cinema system normally requires you to store a super-size brick of a receiver underneath your television. Marantz likes to think otherwise, with its slimline set of NR receivers. Sitting in the middle of the new range...

• Home Cinema 5 out of 5

  Onkyo CR-N755 review

  By Ian Morris 31 January 2013

  For most people the hi-fi is dead. The days of needing two large speakers and a central unit to play music died when we switched to MP3s and AAC audio tracks from the likes of the iTunes store, or Amazon MP3. It wasn't that people didn't want CDs anymore,...

• Home Cinema

  Popcorn Hour A-400 pictures and hands-on

  By Ian Morris 25 January 2013

  By way of an introduction, if you haven't heard of it before the Popcorn Hour range of media streamers aims to offer a way of playing back pretty much any kind of video and audio. When Syabas started making the A100 - the first-generation device - there...

• Home Cinema

  Best Buy CinemaNow Disc to Digital pictures and hands-on

  By Rik Henderson 14 January 2013

  One of Rovi's major announcements at CES in Las Vegas this year was that DivX Plus Streaming digital rights management has been approved for UltraViolet use. This allows several of Rovi's back-end entertainment delivery services to add UV compatibility,...

• Home Cinema

  Netflix 4K Ultra High Definition video streaming pictures and hands-on

  By Rik Henderson 11 January 2013

  There's little doubt that the major story of CES 2013 has been Ultra High Definition (UHD), the name attached to what many still call 4K video. Every major manufacturer has a range of TVs featuring the higher resolution of 3840 x 2160, some LED some even...