A few years ago there was a big craze for home media players these devices were intended to make the watching of digital media on a TV much easier. Unfortunately the trend did not catch on all that well due to the heavy integration of many Media Player features into HD TVs. There was also a problem with the unfortunate fact that most media players used the same SoC, Media Playback CODEC and OS. It meant that in many cases there was little to differentiate products other than the brand name. Now things have changed a little as many of the original players have dropped from the market. Now the remaining companies are looking into different processors and also operating systems. Today we are taking a look at one from Patriot, the PBO Alpine. This is an extension of the original Patriot Box Office media player and offers a few improvements to the line. One of the more interesting ones is the use of Android 2.2 as the OS. So let’s check out the PBO Alpine to see what it brings to the table and if it is worth your time and money.
Value -Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. The PBO Alpine costs about $90 on most of the e-tailer websites that we found it on. This is a good price even with some of the issues we found. We do wish that there was a way to install an internal drive though. It actually added some additional value and made it much more portable. We saw some people using the PBO Core in their RVs, they would upload new music and video to the HDD they installed in the PBO Core and have entertainment on the rode without needing to worry about satellite or an antenna (our PBO Core is setup for this as well). Considering the cost of DVDs, mobile satellite etc. $90 is a pretty good deal.
Conclusion -The Patriot PBO Alpine is a handy product. It actually has more than just a single use in the market. As we mentioned it works great in places where installing traditional TV or cable is impractical and also can be used to allow access to files on displays that you do not want to have a full computer connected to or that have no access to your network. Patriot does need to work on the IR sensor (or move to RF) and also load the PBO Alpine up with a few more applications to make it even more interesting. We also wish that Patriot would have left room for some sort of internal storage. Still at $90 for an HD Media player it is not bad at all.
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