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| Roku Soundbridge M1001 vs Slim Devices (now Logitech) Squeezebox3 by Ray of Light 03/08/2008, 2:38am PST | ||||
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| I looked at these in 2004 or whenever when they first came out, wanted one, they were too expensive. They're cheaper now (Roku $150, Squeezebox $300), and it's easy to compare since the products on the market are exactly the same as they were four years ago.
I bought the Roku first and returned it a week later. It looks nice and the setup is painless. The display is information-sparse (16 pixels high, for two tiny lines of text or one readable one) and the DymoTape search interface (thanks to no numerics on the remote) sucks. You have to have iTunes running all the time, or else run a very beta multiplatform opensource alternative. The player internals are locked down and the "API" is a telnet shell that's one part Cisco switch / one part Apple Logo. The software aftermarket scene is basically one program, a weather displayer that didn't work for me. When it does work, I understand, it takes about 8 seconds to draw the 16x16 mono weather icons due to the Roku's per-pixel "sketch 3 10 on" interface. I was sad to see the top-notch physical design (and minimalistic remote) go, but the native UI is just too shabby and there is no way to make it better. The Squeezebox goes to the other extreme, with an ugly Logitech-billboard design and boxy remote with all the keys laid out in a grid. Paradoxically, the "unpackaging experience" was unusual and pleasant, all cardboard and carefully scripted, like an Apple product would be (the aluminum-and-glass Roku shipped in standard front-flap box with styro cutout and plastic baggies inside). All of the UI is on the server, which is written in Perl and sports a jutting, massive community. This is an odd architectural choice (Logitech's brand new generation of Squeezebox, the "Duet", takes the very traditional and sane approach of having a scriptable OS on the controller, relieving the server of concerns like how many pixels it should scroll at a time), but it works as long as you give the server lots of memory and some CPU. Usable display area is about the same as on a Roku, but it's higher resolution and grayscale instead of mono, so the fonts can be anti-aliased. It adds a second, small line of wayfinding text above the main line, and some icons on the right to indicate where you can go. Searching is SMS style (non-T9) and works OK. For example, you can play a song from the results and still navigate back to the list, or even back to your query and refine it! The Roku could not do this. There are plugins for lazy (T9) searching that I have not tried. The wall wart power supply is amazing, it's about the size of a normal three-prong plug and does not get hot. People say the Squeezebox has better audio components inside and superior analog outs; I used only the digital outs on either one so this didn't affect me. Both of them handled a 100ksong library much better than Winamp is able to. Availability of these products is on the decline: Roku is busy going out of business, and Logitech is full steam ahead with the disposablejunkification of Slim Devices (Duet is classic Logitech: a hundred neat-o features coupled with halfhearted software on a closed platform that will disappear in 3-5 years). Thanks to the liberal software license, the Squeezebox's usefulness can outlive any commercial interest in it and perhaps even outlive YOU. SIDEBAR: What else has Ray tried?: |
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Roku Soundbridge M1001 vs Slim Devices (now Logitech) Squeezebox3 by 03/08/2008, 2:38am PST  |
