Early impressions of the Boxee Box are not good, IMO. I'm a little worried here.

I figured out how to control Youtube Leanback, which I still hate because it just starts playing random videos whether you want it to or not, so the first thing I have to do when I launch it is find the pause button. But the pause button is not the play/pause button on the remote. No, that would make too much sense. I have to press up or down on the remote to bring up the playback controls, and then find the pause button there.

I understand why this is the case - Youtube Leanback is not a Boxee app, it's merely a web page, and it has to use that interface. But to the user, you don't really see that. What you see is when you press the pause button on the remote, it says something like "this video cannot be paused," which isn't true but makes things VERY confusing, even to a user like me.

Bruno, you mentioned how you didn't like how when you look at shows stored locally, it also shows you episodes available on the web. I didn't like that either. But guess what, they made it worse! Yay!

Now they've separated out local and online content, but that means it takes another few clicks to get to your own stuff. One of the reasons I got rid of the WDTV was to eliminate some of those extra steps to get to my content, so this is very disappointing. Add to that that the options you had when viewing this content on pre-1.0 software is now gone, and you have a much more frustrating experience. I can't change the sort order, browse by genre, or search my own content now, and playback of local content was the entire reason I picked this device over the others.

I'm also worried by something else. There's speculations in the Boxee forums that the Box might be a tad underpowered. There is no longer background video playback, and a set of visualizations in the music player that were apparently very popular (milkdrop?) have been removed. I don't see it as too much of a problem, but it might be a concern down the road. As long as I can play 1080p content (which I can), I'll be happy.

Lastly, I tried the photo slideshow last night. My wife and I wanted to show some friends a few photos from our SF trip. This became a disaster:

• when I navigated into a folder of photos, I got 2-3 rows of thumbnails, or what should have been thumbnails. They were just grey boxes with spinning circles in them, which I took to mean it was loading the thumbnails. But after about five minutes of waiting, not a single one had loaded, so I just picked the first file and went from there.
• things started out okay, and the slideshow mode even did the "Ken Burns Effect" you get on Apple TV.
• half of the photos had an annoying flickering white line on their left edge. I assume this has something to do with how the box was rendering them. The photos were rendered very well, but this flickering was extremely distracting to me. My guests didn't mention if it bothered them...
• the worst part of the experience was if I wanted to skip a photo. If I hit the "right" button, sometimes it would go to the next photo (presumably cached), and sometimes this would bring everything to a screeching halt, and we'd be left staring at the photo I wanted to skip, which had stopped moving, and it would just sit there forever. A couple times I could get it started up again, and a couple times I could back out. But one time it just sat there, not letting me do a single thing, and I ended up having to get up and reboot the Box. This is unacceptable for a "finished" product.
• Lastly, the Box seemed a little too slow at transmitting the data. I admit, I'm using powerline networking for this device, I haven't had any problems playing HD video at 3.5Mbps. Admittedly, the photos are around 5MB each, so at 3.5Mbps that would be about 11 seconds to transmit, but I have a feeling that my powerline adapter is going a bit faster than 3.5Mbps. So I'm still stumped.

I'm going to have to give this box a little while. I'm getting a little more "early adopter's remorse" than I usually do with this thing. There is MUCH missing from the Box:

• There's no Netflix yet, and I don't even know if it'll be the new Netflix interface when we do get it - Google TV is shipping with the old Netflix that only shows you your instant queue
• There's no Hulu Plus, but that doesn't bother me too much
• Vudu isn't there yet
• I'm hoping for a more traditional Youtube interface

Perhaps my expectations were too high. I think I'm going to have to readjust them...