Product Listing

Xtreamer Prodigy Silver - The Third Dimension

By Hafeez Sim - 18 Nov 2012
Launch SRP: S$345

Design

Design

It’s been awhile since we have handled a media player as large as the Xtreamer Prodigy Silver. The majority of consumer electronics, the A/V category included, have seen their products grow smaller and smaller. The Xtreamer Prodigy bucks this trend, though there’s a reason for the device’s bulk.

The Xtreamer is composed mostly of metal and plastic. Eschewing the usual all-black exterior, the Xtreamer Prodigy is dressed in a silver metal top and black front and rear. While the player is mostly hollow inside save for the processing board, the thick metal exterior gives the player some weight. As with other media players we have reviewed, there’s no front display on the Xtreamer Prodigy either. However, the larger size of the Xtreamer Prodigy compared with other media players has afforded it the chance to include a volume knob on the front, which also functions as the power button when depressed. From our experience, the volume knob is likely to be unused unless you're going to be sitting at arm's length from the Xtreamer. An SD/MMC card slot sits beside the volume button. Occupying half of the Xtreamer Prodigy’s front façade is the HDD bay, which allows you to slot in a 3.5-inch hard drive. This is the main reason for the overall large size of the Xtreamer Prodigy Silver media player.

Unlike most of the media players on the market, the Xtreamer Prodigy goes for a silver metal top.

The Xtreamer Prodigy Silver lets you slot in a 3.5-inch hard drive to access and use a much larger built-in storage capacity without relying on external drives.

The Xtreamer Prodigy’s larger footprint also allows for more ports to be located at its rear when compared to the smaller media players on the market. It has two USB 2.0 ports, a USB 3.0 slave port, composite and component ports, a HDMI port, optical and coaxial ports for high-def audio and a Gigabit LAN port for a fast, wired internet connection. So for those of you still running the older analog A/V connections, this media player still features them.

The last piece to the design aspect of the media player is its remote that allows you to control the device. Other media players running the Android OS have come up with unique remotes that are either motion sensitive or have a touchscreen in order to fully capitalize on Android’s touch interface. So it strikes us as odd when the Xtreamer Prodigy comes with a standard remote that’s devoid of a touchscreen, nor is it motion-sensitive to take advantage of the Android user interface. We'll detail over the next page on how the remote fared in actual usage. But even before we get to that stage, we've an issue with some of the remote's button functions. While previously we could have gotten away without consulting the user manual, this time we had to consult it to identify some of the functions in proper. That's not a very intuitive design for something that should be straightforward to use.

Due to the Xtreamer Prodigy Silver's larger footprint, there's a truckload of I/O ports on the rear. While there's an antenna (on the left in the image above) to help with wireless signal strength, we did not notice any significant boost in speed while using Wi-Fi to access stored content on another system.

The remote is long and fits well in our hands, except that it feels light and fragile.

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7.0
  • Design 7
  • Performance 7
  • Features 8.5
  • Value 6.5
The Good
BD-ISO & 3D movie files support
Android platform to expand on functionality
Allows installing a 3.5-inch internal hard drive
Built-in Wi-Fi
A variety of anaog and digital I/O ports
The Bad
Big and bulky
Sluggish UI
Silver metal body may not appeal to some consumers
Pricey
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