The Samsung 3D PS50C680 is a very good TV but misses on some features of being a fully smart TV though it is a Series 6 TV. I have searched quite a few websites for information on how to change the FW and get it upgraded with a similar model C700 or something but haven’t found confirmed results. Again, there is a huge risk of bricking the TV so I am a bit hesitant at this point in time to take such a risk. So the next move was to get a small smart media player or IPTV box which provides me with the smart capabilities. After going through a lot of dilemma on whether buying a Boxee box or IOMega TV, I settled on Prodigy 3D black because of only 3 reasons:

– It was cheaper by 200 SEK compared to Boxee box or IOMega TV
– It boasted of more features then the other two
– It was featuring itself as the first 3D media player and it had Android enabled

When I went through the box it had a lot of nice pictures and a lot of stuff written on it. Of course I didn’t like the remote that was shown, but I thought that the features listed could overcome that defect. I read the HW description and was not that impressed by the stuff in there. It has a Via 600MHz processor with 750MB of RAM which didn’t impress me as much. And the reviews on other websites besides the prodigy ones were not that impressive either.

But I took my changes and got the Prodigy black. And now starts my rant on how stupid and senseless that product is. I took it out of the box and was not impressed by the size at all. I plugged it into the TV with the HDMI port and started it up. The startup was painstakingly slow. But expecting something better, I was still a little enthusiastic. Fired up settings and connected it to my WiFi. It connected properly but there was no support for automatic data-time sync. They have that function executed at startup before connecting to the internet. On the UI, there was no feasible way of changing the dates.

Anyways, I continued to the Youtube widget to play some songs. It was painstakingly slow to type in with the onscreen keyboard and the stupid remote. I got a listing of videos and selected one of them. To my surprise I got a brief message that the video could not be loaded and it skipped to the next one in the search list. After skipping about 5 of the videos, it played one. I restarted the unit and tried again with the same results. This was the first blow I had on the device’s capabilities. I tried with a 3D movie which ran like shit. I tried to bring up Android and it ran once every 5 launches.

I then tried to upgrade the FW and it busted 2 of my USB sticks before taking in the FW from the 3rd one. This was the final blow that pissed me off. So after my close brush-up with a stupid product that was not even worth 100 SEK (I think the byteonnet of 100SEK is much better than this stupid black box which cannot even stream properly). The next thing I did was pack it up and give it back to the shop. The shop guy was not surprised since all the boxes that he had sold ended up being returned. I trust a Chinese guy more on alibaba than the extreme prodigy boxes.

So my final advice to anybody who is looking for a smart media player, DON’T BUY ONE! I would much better go for an HTPC or an EEBOX or something like that including a Linux based IPTV player which is much better than the media players.

Enough of my rant and I have taken out my frustration so “Peace out”…