These days consumer electronics is focused on combining different technologies to create devices that are useful, entertaining, and user friendly. Computers are an excellent example of how electronics technology can be extremely versatile, and now computer technology is being used for a wide variety of applications that we really wouldn't recognize as computers. For example, portable media devices are basically just computers that have been designed with the specific purpose of providing electronic entertainment in a highly portable form. Most portable media devices can display video and digital still photographs on their built in color LCD screens. They can also play digital music either over built in speakers for the models that are so equipped or over headphones. In addition to those features, some of these devices can browse the Internet over WiFi network connections, and some can even wirelessly transfer music files between other devices of the same model.
One type of portable media device that deserves special attention though, is the PocketDish. The PocketDish, which is marketed by the satellite TV provider Dish Network, is a special case among portable media devices because it's capable of downloading video from Dish Network digital video recorders. That means anyone who has a digital video recorder from Dish Network with a Dish Network subscription simply has to choose TV shows and movies to record and then download those programs from the digital video recorder's hard disk to the hard disk of the PocketDish. This process takes place over a USB 2.0 connection and requires about five minutes of download time for every hour of video.
While this may seem like a process that may be inconvenient because it requires some planning ahead, it's certainly no less convenient than recording video on a digital video recorder to be watched at home. In fact, many users of the PocketDish may find it most convenient to record the programs that they want to watch and then decide whether to watch them at home on their normal TV sets or wherever they want on their PocketDishes.
Regardless of how the video for the PocketDish is recorded, acquiring video for a PocketDish is much easier than getting video for most other portable media devices. That's because most other portable media devices get video from Internet downloads. While that's certainly a good way to make sure that you can get video without having any digital video recorder, it's also enormously more frustrating of an experience. For example, video downloads off the Internet- especially when you're looking at full length movies- takes an enormous amount of time, and that's after you've gone to the trouble of finding the movie to download in the first place. Also, Internet video is very much an emerging trend, which means that there still aren't many movies and TV shows available over the Internet. Even if you do find what you're looking for, there's a good chance that you'll have to pay a fee to download it. Renting a movie online is relatively cheap, but buying one online can easily cost as much as a DVD.
In all, the PocketDish is a much friendlier way of getting video than the Internet.
