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(....continued) After you have the Netgem netbox set up, and when you turn it on, you get the START screen where you have TV video in the middle of the screen, the status bar at the bottom of the screen, the TV-Top service buttons at the top of the screen for EPG, News, Town, and Life with an advertisement banner above that. And you have an icon in the upper left corner of the screen telling you whether you have email and how many new messages you have waiting. The time is stated in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. Having the time stated in the status bar is very nice.

There is a menu guide that pops up from bottom of the screen. The menu guide is pretty much straight forward, but it may not be too clear as to what the onscreen STOP and ZOOM buttons are for if you did not read the instruction manual. What I do in looking at new set-tops is see whether I can get by without reading the instructions. I would maybe look at a quick one sheet of start-up instructions, but not really read an instruction manual unless I get stuck or confused. I figure that many consumers do not read the instruction manual. Many consumers will just want to plug and play, and then explore even if the exploring eventually meant having to open that instruction manual. Anyways, the menu guide has onscreen buttons for HOME, START, INTERNET, HELP, MESSAGES, ALBUM, SAVE, PRINT, SOUND, PIP, ZOOM, and STOP.

The Home and the Start buttons are different in that the Home button goes to your default Internet home page while the Start button goes to the Netgem screen with the TV video when you first turn on the box. Internet is for inputting website address. Help is for help, but this evaluation model went to where you configure the box. The market versions of the netbox will most likely have the Help button go to a real Help system. Messages is for email. Album is to go to your list of favorite websites. Save is for saving websites to your Album. Print is for printing (I did not test printing with this evaluation model). Sound is for turning off the TV sound while you are surfing. PIP is for turning on the picture-in-picture so you can watch TV and surf the Internet at the same time. Zoom is for zooming out so you get a wider view of a webpage that may not fit horizontally on your TV screen. With a regular browser window on a computer, you can scroll horizontally to the right if you a webpage extends past the right side of the window. The netbox does not scroll horizontally. You instead ZOOM OUT to fit the webpage into the TV screen.

The Netgem browser does a good job of displaying webpages on a TV set. However, one nitpicky thing I did not like about the browser, and this is a nitpicky problem I've seen with other TV browsers, is that the tables on my webpages are moved over to the right a little bit so they do not quite match up with the blue and black column background graphic. Also, another nitpicky item is how the browser did not properly display all of my animated GIF files. The TV screen is a different environment to write webpages for. Maybe my webpages' HTML code or some of my animated GIFs are a little sloppy, but the pages look okay on a computer and on other set-top boxes.

These are minor nitpicks that will just force me as a webmaster to fix those webpage items whenever I get around to fixing them (maybe by just putting the color code in the tables). However, there are corporate folks out there who do ask which set-top box or set-top browser has the best browser experience that is most like a Microsoft Internet Explorer or a Netscape Navigator. That usually means not having to tailor existing webpages too much for viewing on a TV. The Netgem browser is a very good browser, but there will be webpages that don't look quite the same as what you may see when browsing the net with a computer. Again, these are minor items since it's expected that the Netgem browser, as with any other browser, will be tweaked for better performance in the future. And like you have the nitpicky differences between how Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator work on computers, you will find similar nitpicky differences with the various TV browsers.

You move around the webpage using the cursor keys and the PgUp / PgDn keys on the remote keyboard or by using the joystick on the handheld remote control to scroll up and down a page and to move from link to link. You would also use the joystick or the cursor keys on the keyboard to move from link to link.

By moving the joystick in any of the four usual directions (up, down, left, right), the highlight box moved from link to link, like on the WebTV, indicating what link I was on. By then pressing the green button on the remote control (or the Enter key on the keyboard), to click the link, I could further explore the selected link. I had turned on the setting in the netbox options to 'underline links' in a page (as you can see in the screenshots), as I'm used to identifying links this way.

It's really easy and very intuitive to move around. And if you click the onscreen PIP button on the pop-up menu guide, you can surf, scroll, and click links while watching regular television shows at the same time.

The big-name websites looked fine on my TV while surfing with the netbox. USA Today, CNN, Disney, and the other big-name websites looked great. And I was able to watch some flash-animated cartoons with the Netgem netbox. The Netgem netbox has the expected email functions to send and receive email, but also to send Voice Mail and Picture Mail. The Netgem netbox has a microphone at the front of the box. While writing email, you press an onscreen record button and talk into the microphone to record the Voice Mail. Click Here to listen to a Netgem Voice Mail recording. For the Picture Mail, the Netgem netbox grabs a freeze frame of what you may have playing on the TV whether it be from a regular TV, a VCR, or a camcorder.

The user interface for the Netgem netbox is available in various languages including English, French, German, Finnish, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Czech, and Romanian.

I can tell you that I like the Netgem netbox. It is a good Internet TV box. Although, it does have Picture-in-Picture, this particular box is primarily for surfing the Internet on TV. So, I wasn't able to see how Netgem worked with an EPG or onscreen interactive TV program trigger links using the VBI (Netgem has a Netgem TV Reference Design that provides for "Beyond TV" interactive television capabilities that you may eventually see in various TV sets).

For the consumers reading this, expect to see these set-top boxes to be sold under different brandnames other than Netgem. And I know some consumers are asking how much one of these boxes may cost. Although there is no set price for the box at this time, consumers could probably expect the box to have a competitive price that may be under $200. You can visit Netgem at http://www.netgem.com.

Happy Set-Top Surfing!
Ruel

Click here for Netgem interview