Apple TV review

The 40GB hard drive is on the small side if you're planning to copy your entire collection of content over to the device, especially as there's only about 33GB available to use.

The remote control is on the small side

Setting up the box is as straightforward as we've come to expect for anything from Apple -- just answer a few questions about your TV and the country you're in, and you're off.

After your TV is correctly set up, you'll need to connect Apple TV to your network in order to start using it. If you're using Ethernet, you'll find this very simple indeed. Attach the network cable and within a short space of time Apple TV will have found any computers currently running iTunes.

Wireless configuration is nice and easy, too -- we tested it on a Wi-Fi network protected with 128-bit WEP security. Once you enter the key for the network, you'll be able to see Apple TV listed in iTunes. To connect, you must enter a further short code into iTunes that pairs your Apple TV to your iTunes library.

Apple has kept the connections nice and simple but provided everything you'll need to hook it up

One of the best things about Apple TV is its menus. Not only are they very pretty, they're incredibly easy to get to grips with. They remind us of an iPod's and are just as easy to use.

On the initial screen you'll find menus for Movies, TV shows, Music, Podcasts and Photos that correspond to a tab in iTunes. This means that you can easily control the kind of content that is copied to your Apple TV on your Mac or PC.

You get a number of choices in iTunes about what content you want to sync. For example, with music you can send your whole library or individual playlists. In the movies tab you have the option of sending your recently downloaded films, and within TV shows you can pick which series you want to automatically add.

Performance
Music playback works well. We could hear a little click between some tracks when testing gapless tracks, but it was pretty good overall. We were a little disappointed that it's not possible to create playlists via Apple TV and ideally we would like to be able to pick music from a variety of machines to create one gigantic mega-playlist. But otherwise it's like you've hooked your iPod up to your TV.

We really liked the way photos are dealt with. You can select folders to send over to Apple TV, these will then be displayed as a screensaver during system inactivity. Alternatively you can watch them as a slideshow, accompanied by music from your library in a random shuffle mode or from a playlist of your choosing.