Get your actual living-room shows anywhere; SlingPlayer Mobile presents content from your personal TiVo, cable-tuner, and other devices online. The iPhone and iPad apps connect to your Slingbox hardware ($179-$299), streaming home content anywhere, even over the 3G network.
The process looks terrific on a local network; stream to the kitchen, bedroom, or bathroom. (Yeah, we went there.) Quality outside your house depends on your Internet connections, especially your home upstream. In slower situations, the audio gets fuzzy, but remains understandable, while the picture splashes on like a rushed sketch. Fast-paced sports suffer, but paced, dramatic shows lose little.
The bottom line. Since everything looks great when functional, we can overlook setup problems, showing the same-resolution picture on the iPhone 4, and how Sling offers two apps instead of a universal purchase.
iOS 4.1 or later. iPad version requires iOS 4.2 or later.
Stream and control living-room video devices. Great quality on a home network. Good quality, depending on speed, outside your home.
iPhone 4 Retina support is for UI, not image detail. Not a universal app. Initial setup difficulties. Oldest Sling hardware isn’t supported.
RonAnnArbor
January 31, 2011 at 2:40pm
RE: "Oldest Sling hardware not supported" on the iPad app...
That should be NO Sling hardware except the two brand new versions is supported.
See the ratings for the iPad app on iTunes and you will see very very poor ratings, and especially alarming feedback about Sling's customer support. It should be noted that when the iPad software first went on sale, the iTunes wording did NOT indicate only the newest hardware versions were supported (that was quickly fixe) but not before thousands of disappointed downloaders found out it wouldn't work.
Sling's solution? "Use the older iPhone app on your iPad" -- and no rebates to anyone who purchased the iPad version in addition to the iPhone version.
Incidently -- I do use the older iPhone Sling software on my ipad and it works fine with both wifi and 3G.
