As far as we’re concerned, Nuvyyo’s Tablo devices have become the gold standard for watching and recording over-the-air TV programming — if you’re even considering cutting the cord, a Tablo device should factor into your plans.
The company’s original Tablo OTA DVR was a solid first entry — a simple black box that could tune in an over-the-air television signal and stream it over your home network to an Apple TV, iPhone, or iPad and even act as a PVR to record OTA content, provided you were willing to supply your own hard drive.
The company further refined this design last year with Tablo Dual, an elegant “one box” solution in a smaller form factor, with 64 GB of internal storage providing about 40 hours of recording time — more than enough for many casual users, along with features like the ability to pause live television.
This year, Nuvyyo is back with Tablo Dual Lite, a lower-priced version of Tablo Dual that eliminates the internal storage while improving the Wi-Fi capabilities.
Tablo Dual Lite is virtually indistinguishable from its more expensive sibling — you’d be hard pressed to tell the two units apart except for the label on the bottom, which makes sense considering that the elimination of internal storage doesn’t require a change to the unit’s appearance.
As with last year’s original Dual model, you’ll also find the power adapter, a quick start guide and an Ethernet cable in the box. The latter of these is handy if you want to use Tablo with a wired connection to your router, but we think that most users will prefer to simply operate in Wi-Fi mode, especially considering that the Tablo Dual Lite offers one other new perk over las year’s model: 802.11ac support for high-speed streaming over Wi-Fi.
This means that if you’ve got the router capabilities and 5 GHz signal strength where you’re planning to set up your Tablo, you should be able to stream full 1080p content back to your Apple TV with no difficulties at all.
To be fair, we never had Wi-Fi performance issues with last year’s 802.11n model either, but we think support for better and faster wireless technologies is always a good thing.
Check out the full review on iLounge…
