I recently upgraded my NETGEAR Digital Entertainer 700 to a brand new 8000 HD, and I wanted to share my impressions and experience with the new unit. My goal is to compare my experience with the 700 with the new 8000. What's better? What's not? What's cool? What pitfalls still exist?

First, let me say that this is less a review than just my sharing my experience. You should also read the review of the NETGEAR Digital Entertainer 8000 HD, and you might want to check out my first experience with the EVA700 before walking through this more-journal-like piece.

It's also important to disclose upfront, that I have yet to jump on the high-definition bandwagon. I'm using my EVA in the context of a 27" CRT in my basement in front of my treadmill. My primary entertainment system is where the 720p DLP TV, the TiVo, and the HTPC are, In the basement, it's my treadmill, my TV, an older Sony receiver, nice speakers / headphones, a DVD player, and my EVA ... which links me to the 600GB of media on my Infrant ReadyNAS.

So, with that out of the way, let's dive right in...

First impression while off: "It looks exactly the same!"
First impression while on: "Cool new logo!"
Second impression: "Whoa! Looks great!"

The navigation was very tight, which I love! Much better than the 700. The menus were responsive, and colors contrasted well. Just "tight." It felt professional, where the 700 felt less so. This immediately gave me a good impression.

Weather

Kinda weird, but kinda cool that it fires weather at me right away on the home menu screen. When I drilled down into the weather, it was showing me a town in Illinois (where I live) but like 50 miles away from me (not where I live). Also, it thought the date was 12/31/1969 (the zero mark on a Unix calendar). So, what's odd is that it was close, but not quite able to realize who I was and get the weather for me automatically. And there was no obvious way to set the date and my location from that screen.

Navigation Buttons

Another thing I notice was that there were no navigation buttons telling me what to press to go where. Sometimes the back arrow (pretty universal among media centers) took me to the last screen, but sometimes the up arrow did, and other times the left arrow does. It took a considerable amount of time to get used to the "press the left arrow to save" construct.