Roku Soundbridge M500 WiFi music player
By Dan Wu 
posted December 10th 2004 7:53AM
posted December 10th 2004 7:53AM
posted December 10th 2004 7:53AM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
Roku, makers of wireless video and audio home entertainment center players, has introduced a
budget model called the M500 ($199) which will be available at Radio Shack. The unit is 10 inches wide and uses a TFT
display, unlike its bigger brother, the M1000, which used a vacuum fluorescent display.
Well, "bigger brother" is a bit of a misnomer, as the M500 and M1000 are the same physical size. $250 to $200 isn't much of a difference to earn a "budget version" name. If they'd cut WiFi on it and old it for $150 they might catch my interest.
Biggest problem with these Roku producst seems to be ROKU itself. They have done an terrible job of supporting the HD1000 and heve left quite a bad taste in early adopters mouths. The HD1000 had huge potential and they have abandoned it full of bugs and promised features that were never implimented.
Also, thier WiFi is all CF card and "B" ONLY which once connected takes a huge bandwith toll on your entire wireless network. Also, prohibits the use of any newer Pre-N , or 125mbps cards. What were they thinking? Should have just put a PCMCIA port and let users be able to choose thier own cards.
Overall, I think these products are all overpriced and buggy as hell not a good combination especially when you consider the incancy of this product type.
Just an FYI, all of ROKU's products are based on Slim Devices design; who have been around just about forever (well since 2000).
They sell an wired only device for $179 with free shipping. Not much of a price break, but if you are torn, you can support the guys that actually do the developement.
I'm gonna have to throw in another rocommendation for Slim Devies ( http://www.slimdevices.com ). The guy who started the company was a friend of mine in highschool. The teacher would put him in charge of teaching the CS class for the semester. Anyway, the guy is a freaking genius, so I have no doubt in my mind they they'll be doing cool things in the future with their products.
Ok guys, here is the scoop, I have been dying for a Roku Soundbridge for a long time, but had not been able to lay my hands on one, till I read this blog on engadget. I looked for a Radio shack that had one, luckily in the whole Washington DC / MD / VA area, only one Radio Shack had 2 of the M500 for $199 each. I ran and bought them both,ran home hooked it up to my wireless and VOILA i had AWESOME music streaming from my iTunes.
Took me a few minutes to get a hang of programming with the remote but once I had that figuered out it was a breeze to have it up and running.
BUT...yes all good things have a BUT...don't they? As I was reading more about Roku last night I found out that Best Buy was selling the M1000 for $199 and the M1000 has a vapor Tube with a much better display, everything else is basically the same as M500. So why do I want a M500 for $199 when I can get the M1000 for the same money?
So, I wake up in the morning and run to best buy, after trying to explain to 5 sales people at best Buy what Roku sound bridge was and then showing them on the internet, and checking the stock at Best Buy, they had 2 lying somewhere, but no one knew where. So I started going aisle by aisle and found two of the M1000 hidden in a corner shelf next to open box items. Needless to say that I took them both, came home and hooked them up. AWESOME man. I love it, the sound is great and the display is coooool. So guess what, now the Radio Shack M500's are going back :-)
Now for the caveat, I have some music in iTunes that I bought, yes paid for with my dollars and literally bought, from the iTunes store. Now, Roku will not play any music that you have bought from the iTunes store. You need to have music from the CD's or other sources in your iTunes to be able to play on Roku.
Talk about discouraging piracy.
But, overall I would give it a A for the device. Excellent piece of equipment.
Make a CD from your legal iTunes songs, after that rip the songs off of your new legal cd as mp3's! Add them to your MP3 Collection!! I know its a pain in the butt however your problems can be solved that way.
DJ if you had to pay $50 more for the vacuum fluor. display of the M1000 over the M500, would you pay it (ie do you think the display on the new M500 is much worse than the older one?)?
In the past 2 days I have seen and used both the M500 and M1000 and seen the difference in the displays. Needless to say the display on the M1000 is much better than the M500, its not that the display on M500 is not good, it's just that the M1000 display is more fluroscent and more crisp.
Would I have shelled the extra $50 for the M1000....maybe not.
hmm just did a search on bestbuy and they only have M500 for $199. DJ sure got a good deal there.
How about a vote AGAINST SlimDevices? They claim lineout but it is very quiet, which means I have to put the volume near double on my stereo for it to sound good (along with any increase in noise) and when I switch back to the radio I get blasted. When I complained, they blamed me. NOT a good company, not to be trusted.
I just picked up an M500 for $99 through a limited-time deal on dealmac.com (now expired). Setup was a breeze. It automatically found my shared iTunes library wirelessly through my router, no problem. I was pumping tunes through it to my stereo in less than 10 minutes after opening the box. Updating the firmware over the 'net worked flawlessly. The display is even readable from across the room while sitting on the couch. Figuring out the remote was pretty easy. Almost no need to even open the manual. Awesome device!