The good:

1. It’s a pretty box, with delightfully clear LEDs - simple red lights for recording: two of them means both receivers are firing.
2. The swivel search is awesome. I’m a huge fan of imdb when it comes to checking out actors/resses and “what else have I seen them in.” This is essentially that, linked to a record button. Very fun and useful.
3. I already talked about the setup process, but it’s worth mentioning again that it sucks way less than the original Tivos.
4. I like the “Music Photos & More” in principal, but in practice…

The bad, #1: Music Photos & More has a couple of issues.

1. It’s not caching the fact that a network connection exists, so it has to look around every single time you hit the menu.
2. Total lack of organization. There’s a bunch of stuff in there that could do with a good cleaning up.
3. Yahoo! Photos is showing up in there, when the service doesn’t exist. It’s essentially a placeholder for “we’re looking for something new.”
4. Managing any sort of internet addresses still depends on the horrifying Tivo text input, which hasn’t been touched since the first version. Trying to enter a podcast is far far more trouble than it’s worth.

The bad, #2: Slow menus
This was a known issue going in, so not much to say here. It’s a little unnerving that the menus are remarkably slower than my Sony series 1 dvr, however. Everyone keeps saying/hoping that this will improve with software updates. I sure hope so.

The ugly, #1: The peanut remote sucks
I’ve used them before at friend/relative’s houses, and didn’t like them. Now that I have spent more than 5 minutes with it, I can clearly articulate why. It’s not laid out well, period.

I’ve done a rough diagram that demonstrates the overall layout problems with the newer peanut remotes. In short, the finger/hand span required to perform pretty basic Tivo navigation on the new remote is at least twice that required by the old one:

(This peanut remote is for a DirecTV, but the basic layout of all the keys that matter are identical to mine.)

1. Primary navigation on old remote was relatively standard 5-way cellphone setup: up/down/left/right on a circle around the central select button. New remote: 4 buttons in a circle with the select button below, requiring an awkward thumb bend for an insanely common operation.
2. Now playing list button on old remote was a dedicated button, allowing you to keep your hand in one location to return to primary nav buttons. You could also use the tivo-double tap, and still the hand/remote relative alignment didn’t require a change. New remote: No dedicated list button. You must use Tivo-double tap, or drill through menus. A comfortable Tivo-double tap on the wasp-waist form factor of the new remote means that you’re forced to hold more of the upper half in your hand which causes the whole thing to feel unbalanced. Getting back down to the primary nav with the select button in comfortable reach requires shifting the remote back down to the waist. Another insanely common operation that is not optimized in this form factor.
3. The clear button is impossible to get to with one hand. The new remote has been optimized with the number pad at the bottom. Sometimes I use the number pad, but not that often. I’m sure a number-pad junkie hates this, but that doesn’t bug me. What does is that the clear button is still pinned under the number pad, pushing it to the very bottom of the remote. I can no longer conveniently use the clear button to delete shows or cancel actions without using my other hand. Similar to using the Tivo-double tap gesture above, getting to the clear button requires that you shimmy the remote up in your hand until the widest part of the bottom is in your palm in order to use this button. At this point it’s nearly impossible to keep a grasp on the remote at all, forcing you to use 2 hands. That sucks.

To Tivo’s credit, the layout of play/pause/fwd/rev/slow cluster is better.

The ugly, #2: The box is not registering fwd/rev buttons quickly enough, causing a lot of error
Slow response to fwd^3 (super fast forward). There’s a lot of hesitation with Tivo picking up the 1-2-3 forward, which was only ever a problem on the Sony if some major activity was taking place, but on the new one it’s always a problem. Because the ba-doop BA-DOOP BA-DOOP audio feedback is such a strong indicator of what’s going on I assume that if I only hear 2 ba-badoops, I need to hit the button a 3rd time. Gotcha though, that previously entered 3rd ba-doop was still in progress, so when you hit it again, it registers 4x, so it cycles back to the 1st level of fwd. LAME. LAME LAME LAME.