Got the big update today too (Teesside).
There are a lof of useful features. Overall impressions are good-ish.
However, it seems that there are some things that make it more of a pain to use in the most fundemental way. You cannot pageup/down through the mini guide. So it's click, click, click, click, clickety click at infinitum (bad enough doing it yourself but just as horrible listening to somone else in the room clicking away like mad). It's made worse because it is slower than the old browser. Then again, an even better way to do what you used to do with the old browser guide is to use the new yellow button instead (favourites) but that takes up a big chunk of the screen and has to accessed after you have opened the miniguide (rather than directly).
The main guide is more useable than the old but it is still far from a delight to use because it is so slow when navigating and there are too many instances of "programme information unvailable". So you wait a little bit and then the channels on that page update - except the one you are actually highlighed on until a bit later still (or you can navigate some more and come back to it and it might have updated). It's wierd.
I like being able to re-order my fav channels. That is a definite plus. It did take a very long time indeed to do it from scratch (click, click, clickety click moving each fav through every damn channel). I would be extremely peeved if some prat came along and set them all back to the default order (which is very easy to do and should have PIN protection or at least a default selector on the "NO" rather than the "YES confirmation button).
In principle I think the idea is very good but the cable STB manufacturers have a lot to answer for because I think the lack of memory and processing power for these functions was way below what was really required back when they were designed nevermind the way they are now.
I would have liked to have seen a set of programmable timers that is not related to the guide at all. You know, like the old analogue boxes, so you can simply set time, channel, daily, weekly etc for your regular programmes without having to use the guide (which is useless after 3 days anyway). I'd have thought that if you have to limit the guide to 3 days then an independent timer would have been a very good compromise solution.
Gripes aside, I'd like to say thank you to the people behind the scenes who have been trying to give us something more like what we want and it must be a pretty thankless task (especially when people like us moan at them all the time
).