First Impressions of the Apple TV: Lots of Entering Passwords Using the Remote

This is a daily opinion column written by Lowell Heddings, the founder of How-To Geek, featuring his take on the latest in the world of technology.

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We got our new Apple TV units at HTG HQ and we’re busy playing with them to see how it all works, and getting things ready to publish a bunch of articles next week. But in the meantime, here are our initial thoughts:

• The App Store Has Promise… the biggest feature in the new Apple TV is that you now there’s an App Store, and you can download video apps, games, and other things, like shopping or weather apps. It will be up to developers to see what they come up with that makes sense on the big screen. We’re guessing a lot of games.
• Being able to search across iTunes, Showtime, HBO, Netflix, and Hulu in a single interface is awesome. You just search for a show or movie, and you see the list of places that you can watch it. It’s great.
• Searching with Siri is interesting. We’ll be giving this a more thorough testing, but so far it usually works, but requires being pretty exact a lot of the time. It’s worth noting that there’s a regular search feature in case you don’t feel like using Siri.
• The old Apple TV remote still works on the new Apple TV — no setup required. You can’t access Siri, but you can get around the entire interface.
• The new touch remote is really easy to use, and works well. Having a distinct pause button is really helpful, and the best thing is that if you’re watching cable TV on a different input, Apple TV can switch inputs automatically to the Apple TV input by just pressing the button on the remote.

The biggest problem is entering in your passwords into every single app — Netflix, Hulu, etc. It’s extremely annoying that you have to do it using the remote and the on-screen keyboard rather than using your iPhone’s keyboard. And the Remote app for iPhone hasn’t been updated to support the new box.

So tedious. That’s not what we expected out of the setup experience at all, and they need to fix it.

Once you get through that part, it’s really nice and easy to use… and isn’t all that different from the old version, as everything is laid out the same. You just have access to more things now, and the remote is a lot better.