If you've ever wanted a home entertainment system that's so portable that it can leave your home every time you do, there are a number of options on the market today. While any modern laptop computer can provide you with all of the entertainment that you'd enjoy at home- music, TV shows, digital photo albums, video games, and even movies in HDTV if you have an advanced enough model- a there are cheaper alternatives that are even more portable than a laptop.
In fact, there's a whole class of devices called portable media devices that can play video, digital audio files like MP3's, display digital photos, and some of them can even serve as video game platforms. These devices tend to have color LCD screens built into their casings that are a few inches across and store their media on built in hard drives that can vary in size from one or two gigabytes all the way up to one hundred and sixty gigabytes! Some have built in speakers, but all can play audio over headphones, and they tend to have battery lives of over six hours for playing video and much longer for audio.
There are several ways that these devices get their media, but it almost always involves downloading it from a computer. Most models are compatible with Windows and Macintosh operating systems, but some are even compatible with Linux. Of course, those computers still have to get that media from somewhere, and with the exception of songs that are ripped from compact discs, that media is almost always downloaded from the Internet. This can be problematic, at least for video, because while digital music is now widely available and very affordable to download from the Internet, Internet video is still in its infancy. Video, with the exception of amateur video on video sharing sites, is still relatively rare to find on the Internet. For example, if you want to download an episode of your favorite TV show, it might not be available on the Internet, while another show that's just as popular is available. Plus, there's a good chance that you'll have to pay for the download, especially in the case of a movie.
The PocketDish is a portable media device that can put all of these concerns to rest though. That's because the PocketDish downloads it's video from Dish Network digital video recorders rather than the Internet. It has all of the features of other portable media devices, but makes any of the programming available from Dish Network (except for HDTV at present) also available for download to a portable device. This is a much less frustrating way to get the video for your home entertainment system in miniature than downloading it from the Internet for so many different reasons. For example, all of the TV shows that you ordinarily watch are there for download. Also, you can make as many downloads as you want for free because they're all included in the cost of your Dish Network subscription.
For all of these reasons, the PocketDish makes the ideal home entertainment center for going away from home!
