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Feedback
We've had CR3 in Colchester for a little while now, and whilst I was giving it a chance to get 'settled in' I suspended my opinion, but it's been long enough now.
It's very VERY slow. Changing channels - even up and down - is very slow. Rather than click-click-click it's click..........................click.............. ...........click. Sometimes I think the machine hasn't registered the button press and so press it again. After a while it changes channel and then a while later changes again. Typing the channel number in isn't much better, I press number '1' and then wait...... '1' appears on the box, press another number...... wait..... it appears. If I type in 3 numbers (say '144') one after another it seems to flummox the box and so I have to wait for each one.
The guide/now-next feature. I can't say much about this because I think it hardly ever works. Sometimes the information is completely inaccurate - although I guess that is the fault of the listings service and not the box or CR3. Now/Next doesn't update very quickly, so it can be 3pm and it's still showing 11am programmes. This used to happen with the old system but after a minute it would 'realise' and update but that doesn't happen as quickly with CR3... 10, 20 minutes later it still thinks it is 4 hours earlier.
However, most of the time there is no information on the Now-Next, it just says "See Guide for information". So then there is the very long and torturous prospect of having to use the Guide. Maybe 1 time in 10 or 15 goes I press Guide, then press down to "Entertainment" and press Select and.... nothing happens.... 10 minutes later, still nothing....another 10 minutes, still nothing. Put box onto standby for 5 minutes, turn it back on and it's still on the Guide page with no information. Every once in a while magic happens and you actually get the channel informatio, on-screen you can see 5 or 6 channels with the time across the top and all the information there for you to see.... "No Information Available" is followed by "No Information Available" which is just before "No Information Available", then there is a Friends episode for half an hour and then "No Information Available" followed by "No Information Available".
At the moment I am finding CR3 painfully slow to use and the Now/Next/Guide system to be virtually unusable, and if you do use it, it's slow and usually doesn't work, when it does work most of the time it is completely useless because it has no information anyway.
Hopefully, these are still just teething troubles and maybe once CR3 has been rolled out to the whole country NTL can put the resources into it to make it (i) work and (ii) fast enough to use without wanting to throw things at the TV because it's too slow.
Jon
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