TabletBlog Premiere - Stream your home Satellite/Cable/DVR to your tablet with HAVA

Greetings from CTIA! Actually I am not at CTIA (I wish!) but, thanks to Monsoon Multimedia, I have had the opportunity to play with a preview of the newly announced HAVA Player for the Nokia N800 and N810 Internet Tablets. I have to say - I can't wait to make this a permanent fixture in my home. Before we look at the Nokia Internet Tablet HAVA player, let's get some questions out of the way.


What is HAVA? HAVA is the brain-child of Monsoon Multimedia - the founders of which were the original brains behind the Dazzle products and more. The HAVA system has three major components: A HAVA box, an internet connection, and a mobile player. The HAVA box captures your satellite/cable box or DVR (TiVo, etc.) signals, encodes them, and streams them out to the mobile player. The mobile player has a software interface to send remote control commands to the satellite/cable or DVR. Basically - it takes your remote control and television display with you.

Hey - Isn't that the same as Slingbox? There are striking similarities, aren't there? There are differences: HAVA has an Internet Tablet player, WiFi options, multiple simultaneous viewers, Windows Media Center support, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Also - mobile player software isn't an extra purchase whereas Sling sells theres apart from the Slingbox itself. Look at the "Comparison" tab of any of their product pages. The HAVA boxes range from US $99 to US $249 for different features.

Okay - Now on to the Nokia N800/N810 interface. This is better in video. Here you go:


Keep in mind that the TiVo I was connected to was set up by Monsoon and is at their office. It's not likely that I am the ONLY person previewing this product, so bandwidth and response is likely limited. Also, my copy of the software is a preview version. I don't know what will change when it is shipped, but I expect it to be more responsive on the buttons in a dedicated home environment.

The program installs like any other .deb file (it's about 2 MB) and shows up in the Extras menu. Once installed, the user has to configure their player and Connect through the menu. That's all there is.



There are four basic remote control options. Above are two examples. Sadly, the screen shot application did not capture the image in the window.

Video streaming is FAST. It's the fastest I have seen streamed full-screen to the Internet Tablets. Quality isn't the most crisp (don't expect full 640x480) but some of that can be attributed to the fact that I did not set up the box on the other end.

How do I like it? Well - If the button response gets better in the full software release, I simply must buy one. Monsoon and Nokia are demonstrating this at CTIA right now. If you're at the show - stop by and see it in person!