Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Xfinity TV Mobile App

The Xfinity TV Mobile App is a nice little add on for the Xfinity Mobile App.   Not sure why they couldn't have added all of the functionality into one app but I am sure there is a good technical reason.  The app has the following features:

  • Watch OnDemand shows on your iPhone, iPad or iTouch
  • Search OnDemand and TV Listings
  • Use the App like a remote to change the channel on your TV or schedule your DVR
  • It's Free!!!
I have been playing around with this app a bit over the past few weeks.  The quality of the OnDemand content is good.  I didn't experience any buffering while watching using wireless.  I have not yet tried to watch anything using the 3G connection.  I do have a tough time going from watching content on my 55" HDTV to watching something on a 3.5" screen.  But in a pinch it will suffice.

The big issue that I have is that the remote scheduling app does not work with the Comcast TIVO cable boxes.  It would be great to be able to schedule programs remotely but the functionality just isn't there.  I don't think it will ever work with the TIVO boxes as I read a while back that Xfinity will eventually end support for TIVO.  Might be time to go back to the standard Comcast DVR.

Xfinity Mobile App

Well I finally got rid of my old run down Blackberry and upgraded to an iPhone 4S.  Pretty impressive piece of hardware this iPhone is, the greatest thing is all of the apps that I can now play around with.

Xfinity offers two Mobile apps for the iPhone, the Xfinity TV Mobile App and the Xfinity Mobile App.  I will be be discussing the latter in this post.  The Xfinity Mobile app provides the following functionality:

  • One place to view all email and voicemail messages
  • View Xfinity voice call logs
  • Access your Xfinity Address book
  • Send and receive text messages
  • It's Free!!
This was one of the first apps that I installed on my iPhone and I was a bit disappointed when it locked up on the login screen and would not go any further.  My wife was able to install the app on her iPhone without a problem though.  I eventually reinstalled and was able to get in.  It is a nice little app but it turn out to be a little overkill for me.  I have a bunch of different email addresses on GMail, yahoo and hotmail that I have set up on the iPhone.  It seemed a bit silly to use one app to get my comcast email and the iPhone mail program to get the rest of my email.  So I ended up installing the app.  We dropped our land line this month so maybe if we still had xfinity voice the app would be more useful to me. 

My wife on the other hand loves that app.  She only has one email address so the app works great for her.  One of her complaints with the iPhone mail software was if she deleted a message from the iPhone it still remained in her Xfinity account on her PC.  With the Mobile app once she deletes the message is is gone from the phone and her account on the PC.

Overall a nice little app even though it is of no use to me.