There's something about a box with a button in the middle that gets people really excited. Add some nice finishing to that box and cool coloring and you'll have a lot of people drooling over what that thing is. The same goes for Metrological's Mediaconnect TV, except this thing is not just a box with a button in the middle, it is actually a Mini ITX device that plans to stream high-quality media right into your house.

Tired of waiting for a better HTPC? Take a look at the Mediaconnect TV, perhaps the first retail device to use Intel's Canmore System on Chip architecture (or CE 3100, to be succinct). The gadget uses a Linux-based (don't you think Linux is getting a lot of attention lately?) operating system and supports all major video codecs, plus DTS and Dolby Digital decoding for 7.1 channels.

Buying the standard device will get you two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI 1.3a/component/composite and TOSLINK jacks, the usual SD/MMC card reader, as well as 756 DDR2 SDRAM, 2GB storage and the Intel CE3100 Media processor. But the best thing is the gadget being extremely customizable with a lot of options available, such as UMTS/HSUPA radios, DVB T/C/S tuners, Bluetooth, and 802.11n Wi-Fi to name a few.

It also has a built-in web browser (Flash 9.0 support enabled, of course), optional DVB0T tuners, as well as a camera with unknown image quality. I am not sure whether this is indeed the next generation of TVs but what I am sure is that the TV of the future will look a lot like this box. Who knows, perhaps 20 years from now, I will be writing about the first device to introduce the TV revolution. Or perhaps not. Depends on how attracted people will get when they see the box with a button in the middle hitting stores.


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