Following notices on my screen telling me “You Must Upgrade Your Set Top Boxes”, I finally did, and I’m already regretting it.
The first thing you will notice is that the remote is missing many familiar buttons, and with them some functions that have been around since the invention of the DVR.
1.) There is no more slow-motion or frame-by-frame. Want to see exactly what happened on the biggest play of the game? Well now you can’t!
2.) There is no way to clearly see the screen you have paused. When you press pause, the screen dims a little and displays program information at the bottom, then clears for a moment, then dims again and displays different program info.
3.) There is no skip forward button. To skip forward you must now press the Google Assistant button and say “skip forward ‘x’ minutes/seconds”. Or just use fast-forward, or program chaptering.
4.) There is no more DVR button. To get to your DVR menu you must either press the Google Assistant button and say “DVR”, or press the Home button, then down button twice, then OK. See, so much simpler than the old way of just pushing one button.
5.) You can set up your favorites in the guide, then set the guide to only display favorites. But you can no longer flip-by-favorites using your channel up/down buttons. Your only options are “flip all” or “flip subscribed”.
6.) All FF and Rewind Speeds are roughly half as fast as the old DVRs.
7.) Caller ID notifications (for those of us that still had a landline) are no longer available.
8.) While in the guide, the cursor is now always in the top row, not the middle. In that row it can move back and forth. The old guides kept the cursor stationary in the middle row and the guide would move around the cursor, unless you changed a setting to make it dynamic.
Among the other important things to know, the new boxes are only compatible with HDMI connections. There is no backward compatibility with older TV’s.
Fios TV One (VMS4100ATV) has a steep learning curve, both with its remote control and user interface. It is nothing like the previous models.
The buttons on the remote are black-on-black, with small fine gray/white print, and mostly smooth to the touch. Lacking tactile feedback, you often have to look at the remote instead of just feeling it. The on-screen information is rather small and fine print. You can increase the contrast, but you cannot make the print larger or bolder. Both of these changes will make it harder, if not impossible, for my visually-challenged mother to use.
I’ve only had these new boxes for less than 12 hours. The one in my living room has rebooted randomly many times now. Just manually ran all the updates for Android TV, Fios TV, the media server, and the remote control (you know, the things you assume would happen automatically during the install). Hope this fixes it.
I hope this first impression summary helps someone out there know what to expect when they are forced to “upgrade”.
I hate to state the obvious, Verizon, but taking away functions is not an upgrade. If it is your intention to get people to cut the cord and move to streaming, you are definitely helping your customers make that choice.
