Yes, @RadioWave you are very correct that almost everything you are going to currently read is a workaround for poor design, nonintuitive design, and clearly no work with the customer base on a beta level.
There have been some solutions that came out of the feedback from the July rollout, with the November software builds from Cisco Videoscape (may actually be Technicolor and Cisco), and the December build rollout out december 15th, concurrently with the November builds, then some major issues like the power saving issue was dealt with by freezing the rollout, and then in the December builds were replaced with the January builds.
So few solutions to concerns and bugs have been developed to date, some have been damage control, but at the moment, we are all dealing with the November/January builds, and all we have are workarounds, along with some things we know that at the moment there is no going back to (The previous Nextbox builds with the old list and guide models, and it appears there is no going back from the tiles (at least at the moment anyway - this is the model that Espial uses at the moment is the tile model which is actually designed for IPTV and a completely different technical model).
The current rollouts are considered by Espial as interum moves allowing companies to move forward with the Espial IPTV model while taking advantage of running it in a limited way on the legacy QAM cable boxes. They were confident in their presentations that it could be done, but it appears that they really werent prepared to do it by July, or even February of this year for that matter.
So yes, these are not solutions - they are workarounds, all developed by user experience, and definitely not intuitive or user friendly, not meeting the marketing expectations of better, faster, less clicks and other claims that this current design just cannot live up to as currently programmed.
Hopefully in the next build which looks at all we have put forward, we can see more solutions and improvements.
As I have said often, I can only hope, I am done being mad, and time will tell, but for me and many others, they are on the clock with a drop dead date of the end of my contract, and if necessary if it doesn't come soon enough, I will eat the cancellation fees and move on.
But for now, I just respond to people like yourself to valid your feelings, to clarify and to provide workarounds that at least let you use the device, and let you which ones just are not possible.
Remember that there is a gold mine of workarounds in this thread, but I will acknowledge that they are necessarily easy to find. A few users are attempting to compile all we know about the box to assist others, but the reality it is only because we want to help, and we do have lives beyond trying to help.
Bruce
