Down on digital entertainment adapters

PC Magazine's Bill Howard goes ballistic (well, as much as he can, as it's hard to imagine him really hot under the collar about anything) on digital media adapters, those little boxes (like the DSM-320 from D-Link, pictured at right) that can stream music, videos, and photos over your home network from your PC to your home entertainment setup:

The digital living room has no iPod: no killer convergence product with near-flawless design and execution that
legitimizes and expands the category. Instead, welcome to the world of not-ready-for-prime-time media hubs... After
testing nearly 20 of them in the past year, I've reached these conclusions: Cool and affordable as they are compared
with good CD or CD/DVD changers of several years ago, they're unfinished products, missing features and short on ease
of use. There's not an iPod-class hub among them.The market remains gawky and adolescent (only the Turtle Beach
AudioTron is as much as 18 months old), as the portable MP3 player market was two years ago. Most digital media hubs
still handle only music, not photos or videos. Interfaces are clunky.

And for the most part, he's right. Most people have no idea what in the hell these things are for, and even if they did, probably wouldn't have much use for them in the first place. Obviously that's going to change sooner or later
(almost certainly later), but the biggest obstacle right now is probably the lack of any real unified standards for connecting together any of this stuff (at least, not yet), not to mention the tons of competing audio and video formats to deal with. It'll get better, if for no other reason that that it has to if all these companies want to start making some real money.