Unboxing
- Size doesn't always matter
- Lots of accessories... but shame, no TV included!
- Luca, help!
- Heavy Metal vs. Plastic Pop
- Best of the rest
- Pictures
Unboxing new gadgets is always a pleasure. The first thing I noticed was the very compact box. It's smaller than the iXtreamer box, more similar to the e-TRAYz box and probably to the Pro box which I couldn't find... probably put it in the basement. Almost no space is wasted in the box as you can see from the picture. Nature, especially trees will be thankful, unless they've already been chopped :)
Lots of accessories... but shame, no TV included!
The Ultra comes shipped with everything you need to make it work out of the box. The only thing they forgot to put in is a TV, so you should get one first as FullHD movies look much better with big TVs. Apart from that you get the power supply of course, a USB charging cable for a wireless keyboard, oh... a wireless keyboard, a remote control (MCE) which looks a dozen times better than those old Microsoft or Logitech MCEs, an HDMI cable, screws, cheap China batteries, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, the stand and a USB flash drive for the first orders.
Two years after my first Xtreamer unboxing I'm still not photogenic enough to bear seeing my face in a video so here is an unboxing video created by my friend Luca or better known as garibald75 in the Xtreamer forums.
The Xtreamer Ultra's build quality is really nice. Holding the unopened box already gave the impression that I got something very valuable. I wasn't disappointed when holding the Ultra in my hands for the first time. It felt very solid, unlike my Zotac ID-11 which I have been using now for almost a year. While the Zotac's second name is plastic, the Ultra's second name should be metal, heavy metal if you wish.
It weighs about 450 gramm more than my Zotac. Could have been more if they used aluminium for the front panel and top cap as well. The side coolers of course are key to the weight, so why not removing them to see how "brave" the Ultra is without the cooling plates... well, to keep it short: I didn't succeed in removing them. Guess they used a lot of glue... anyway, later I found a better way to disassemble the Ultra.
I hated the stand of the first Xtreamer model, but I love this one. You need more strength to attach it to the device but only this way you can be sure it will stick to the device as long as you want it to. But the best two accessories are the wireless keyboard and the MCE remote control.
The keyboard is very compact, if you happen to know the Logitech diNovo Mini, the Xtreamer wireless keyboard is that type of size. Like the Logitech, it has an integrated touch pad but dedicated arrow buttons and two more dedicated buttons working as left and right mouse buttons. The downside of the keyboard's miniature-madness is that I could not find out how to use button combinations like Alt+F4. The imprint implies that I could use it but it didn't work. Anyways, this is a nice addition gadget as it also includes a laser pointer that you could use for your PowerPoint presentations, or in my case, to keep your lazy cat busy. It would have cost about 50 € if I had wanted to purchase it separately from another shop.
The remote control looks like the new model, which has been introduced with the release of the iXtreamer. The difference is that it is a MCE remote, which means it is compatible to media center applications such as Windows Media Center or XBMC. Very nice, as an MCE remote control is a must have for a media center and would have cost me another 20 € or so for an extra one.
An HDMI cable is anything but granted. Other products don't bother to include it. But ever since the customers wished that the first Xtreamer would have had an HDMI cable included, each new media player device by Xtreamer had this cable for free. Kudos for holding on to that for the Ultra as well, it will keep a few customers from being disappointed when using the Ultra for the first time on a Saturday evening noting that they don't have a spare HDMI cable. Only those people with 100 € HDMI cables will be disappointed, crazy people :)
Inside I found a USB flash drive as well, 8GB to host the Xtreamer Ultra OS, called "Everest" which comes in different variations on different boot partitions on the flash drive, one providing an out-of-the-box working XBMC installation as well. The rest is common and should be found in every other HTPC: batteries, power supply, screws and other stuff you can see in the video above or on the pictures below.
