Click Here to Go to Previous Page

(....continued)   Let's take a look at one of the "rooms." In the "home office," you have a desk with a word processor on it, along with letters, postcards, and other items placed on the desk. There is also a telephone on the desk. I would guess that when the "future features" of the word processor and the Internet Telephony are activated, you will be able to click the word processor to get the word processing and you will be able to click the telephone in order to get the Internet Telephony. ("Internet Gaming" is also a "future feature" and I would guess that the video game machine found in the Entertainment Room would be for that.)

The "smart menus" of the "home" and the "room" page metaphors are easy to understand. And there are labeled links that you can also click to get around from category to category and from page to page.

After visiting the various rooms, it was time to just surf the Internet. If you know specific addresses of websites to visit, you press the Goto button on the keyboard or on the remote control and type in the address. Or you could press the Search button and search for something interesting. The WebSurfer sent me to Yahoo for the search engine.

Whenever you go to a new page and the page is loading, the screen says "Loading" in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. There is also a yellow horizontal line at the bottom of the screen that expands and shrinks in size to tell you that the page is still loading. At the lower right-hand corner of the screen is the aforementioned rectangular location box that has a green line in it telling you where you are on the page whether at the top, the bottom, or in the middle of the page.

The WebSurfer supports HTML 3.2. What you see on the screen with the WebSurfer looks almost like what you see on a regular computer screen except all the text fonts are in Sans Serif (block style without the trailing tails like with a Courier or Times-Roman type font.) The formatting of the page is what you would expect for a computer monitor (webmasters will be delighted to hear this). There is not too much if any of the forced TV-screen squeezing of pages like with the WebTV ®. The text links are all underlined like with a computer browser. If you are used to surfing the Internet with Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer, you will be at home using the WebSurfer. The screens are clear and easy to read. I was really surprised at how good all of the screens looked. It seemed almost all of the webpages that I surfed easily fit the TV screen without any squeezing. The few that did not quite fit required that I scroll from left to right using the left and right arrow keys to scroll the right side of the page into the TV screen. I am very impressed with the very sharp and clear screen display.

According to the WebSurfer website, two million WebSurfer units have been sold on contract. According to news reports, the WebSurfer was recently introduced to Europe in an advertising campaign during the World Cup 1998. The WebSurfer looks like it could provide stiff competition for WebTV and other set-top boxes in the foreign markets. WebTV already has the U.S. market, was recently introduced to the Canadian market, and has footholds in the Japanese and British markets. But the overall international market is really up for grabs. The WebTV (both classic and plus versions) uses a proprietary environment. Such a proprietary environment has to be in place first for a particular country in order for the WebTV to be used. The WebTV proprietary environment has to be tailored to the particular needs and preferences of a particular country. It's like how a magazine such as TIME or NEWSWEEK would have a U.S. version, but would have a completely different version for another country. It's somewhat similar to how AOL expanded to foreign countries with its proprietary network software interface but without the set-top boxes (although that could change with AOL's acquisition of NetChannel). Such a proprietary environment with its underlying infrastructure of partnerships between the network, content providers, and manufacturers and the need for coordination between all parties takes time to develop. This leaves a gap for Internet-capable set-top products like the WebSurfer to fill.

With that in mind, I was looking at a configuration setting screen on the WebSurfer and noticed that the WebSurfer only uses webpage-based email. More accurately, the WebSurfer uses IMAP4 email. The WebSurfer goes to a WebSurfer email page that the user logs into to send and receive email. This is like what you have with the free webpage-based email provided by Hotmail, Yahoo, Excite, and others. This is different from the POP email accounts that most ISPs provide to subscribers. These "free" webpage-based email services are typically supported by advertising.

When I saw that the WebSurfer did not appear to support POP email, I wondered "why?" Then I saw what I think is an ingenious design idea for the interface that may appeal to corporate buyers of WebSurfer product. A corporate buyer or an ISP could set up partnerships with a search engine and an email service to provide the default search engine and default email service on the version of the WebSurfer to be sold by the corporate buyer or ISP. The corporate buyer or the ISP could either take the default home page settings or put in their own settings where they design their own default home page and set up a partnership with a particular service to provide the search engine or email service. It's already commonplace for an ISP to partner up with a search engine for the search capabilities. It is more typical for an ISP to directly provide POP email accounts. However, it is only recently that you began to hear about partnerships with the advertising-supported email services. Setting up a partnership with another company to provide email services means that the ISP or the corporate entity does NOT have to directly provide the resources to provide email. (Of course, for regular users, if you stick with the WebSurfer offerings, then the email is provided in-house by WebSurfer.) So, just to try things out, I changed the settings on that configuration screen to call the Internet using my regular ISP (not Sprynet) and to use different default page settings such as using a different home page, a different email service, and a different search engine. After trying it out and seeing that you can actually change the settings, I set everything back to the original settings. The WebSurfer folks tell me that they do provide support to corporate buyers and ISPs.

At this time, the WebSurfer is a box with a good Internet Browser and with IMAP4 email capability. There is no direct newsgroup support at this time, but users can easily go to http://www.dejanews.com for newsgroups. There is also no direct Chat support, but, again, users can go to websites supporting chat to do chat. (Links could certainly be put on the default home page for dejanews.com and for webpage-based chat sites) Although the WebSurfer does have 16-bit stereo sound, only WAV and AU files are supported at this time. MIDI files and RealAudio are supposed to be supported in the future. These are all "future features" that should be provided in a future software upgrade. The software upgrades are supposed to be automatic.

Happy Set-Top Surfing!
Ruel

P.S. To those interested retail buyers who are asking, the manufacturer's suggested retail price is $299. If you are in Canada, you may find the WebSurfer in retail stores. For those in the U.S., you may NOT be able to find the WebSurfer in retail stores. The WebSurfer folks also plan to sell their set-top box via the WebSurfer website in the future.
    Also, to those WebTV viewers who have been writing in: do NOT confuse the WebSurfer product with the WebTV Classic or the WebTV Plus. The WebSurfer is a competing product that is different from and unrelated to the WebTV products. Do NOT confuse WebSurfer with WebTV. (And, NO, you will NOT get the WebTV Network or the WebTV Plus Network with the WebSurfer.)

P.S.S. I've received various email messages asking about and commenting on various set-top boxes including the WebSurfer. For instance, several companies (both U.S. and foreign) were looking at demo units of various set-top boxes. If you are interested in a WebSurfer box (the new WebSurfer Pro box is supposed to be out now), or any set-top box, you may want to give a serious look at a demo unit before making your very important purchasing decisions.