Conclusion

With the O!Play HD2, ASUS really succeeded in creating a very good and easy to use media player. It already start when you configure the device for the first time. The process takes almost no time at all. ASUS has done a very good job in creating a device using which it really is a pleasure to stream a movie to your television.

Of course we also tried to play full HD content. In the past this use to be the achilles heel of some media players. This simply didn't succeed in this test. For the O!Play this is absolutely no problem at all. Every Video we tried was palying smoothly. But at the point you'll also have to consider that your network has to be fast enough to cope with the datarate of large full HD material. For example an old WiFi network could force the O!Play to buffer from time to time.

If we look at the features ASUS really succeeded in delivering quite a lot of useful services and what is even better all the menus and submenus follow kind of the same structure. There really is a red line through the navigation of every single window which makes it very easy to handle the device. Talking to ASUS revealed that they were very proud of their firmware upgrade feature and in fact it is childrens play to do an update. You'll simply have to navigate to the corresponding option in the setup and afterwards the O!Play does almost everything by itself. Sure you need an internet connection to do so.
We really were surprised that the O!Play was so easy to use and quickly configured.

Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch