Digital Trends

Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player June 3rd, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Viewing Images

Displaying images is the Actiontec Wireless Digital Media Player's strongest feature. Images are sorted in folders much like the music is and playback suffers from the same folder restrictions, but with images, this is much more acceptable than with music. Curiously, the issue we had with selecting one audio file from a folder and then only being able to play that one file is not an issue with images. If you select one image from a folder, you can then go forward or backwards through the folder to view the other images.

The system allows you to assign music from your music list to play in the background while viewing images if you chose. Images can be played in alphabetic order or randomly. You can also play images one at a time, progressing with the forward and backward buttons on the remote, or as a slideshow. You can set the slideshow to wait between one and 60 seconds between each image.

Browsing The Web

It's a great idea, but browsing the Web via your Actiontec Wireless Media Player just isn't user-friendly at all. With no mouse or no keyboard, you are stuck with the four-direction arrow keys for browsing. This means you can only select links by highlighting the word and clicking the Enter button on the remote. Web browsing is also done in a very low resolution, so unless you view sites for mobile devices only, you'll be missing out on a large portion of the Website.

Actiontec includes a small selection of Internet radio stations and these work well. You can also play any other radio station not listed in the presets with ease. We had no problem playing any of Winamp.com's net radio listings — except for having to navigate through the page with the Actiontec remote.

The Web browser relies on the bookmarks on the server computer, so if you find a number of mobile-ready Websites and add them to the favorites list, it will greatly improve Web browsing. Unfortunately, it still is very slow and tedious. The player also includes a listing of nine news sites, but sadly, you can only read the lead sentence of each article, making it rather useless.