Comcast Enthusiast (Or XFINITY as they are now calling it)

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Weekly Verizon Fios Advertisement

I think I have mentioned it here in the past that I get a letter or postcard just about every week from Verizon FiOS trying to get me to switch from Comcast. Usually these letters tout some new feature that "Cable" does not offer. This week the new features they are advertising have me a bit intrigued.

FiOS has something called Widgets which traditionally allow you to access local information like traffic or weather in a ticket under the program you are watching. The new widgets apparently allow you to view Twitter, Facebook or ESPN Fantasy Football. I am not a big Twitter or Facebook user but it would be pretty cool to check my Fantasy Football scores while I am watching the game. Right now I either have to run into the other room to check my scores or wait for my extremely slow Blackberry Fantasy Football App to update.

The Gizmodo blog has a few screenshots here if you are interested.

New Smartzone Features - email and digital voice

When Comcast switched over to Smartzone one of the biggest complaints that many people had was that you could no longer see all of your email boxes in one place. Comcast apparently has been listening and has recently added this functionality to Smartzone. They went a step further as well and you can also add third party accounts like Yahoo and Hotmail.

I tried adding my secondary accounts last night and it worked great. My accounts showed up in my Smartzone homepage and also show up in the folders section of the email page. My only complaint is that when I imported the accounts all of the messages in those mailboxes showed as unread so I had to go in to mark the as read in order to easily tell that I have new messages. No big deal though. For instruction on how to add additional email accounts go here.

Comcast has also recently launched a feature that allows secondary account users access to check voicemail in Smartzone. Unfortunately it isn't completely working for me. I was looking forward to this as I have access to messages online and but my wife does not. In order to listen to messages online she needs to log onto my account, kind if a pain. I was hoping that this new feature would solve our issue but it does not seem to be working. After going through the instructions here, I had my wife log into Smartzone and the voicemail messages still do not show up. She can see the messages if she clicks on the voice tab on Comcast.net and logs in but it does not show unheard messages and she can not access voicemail from within Smartzone. If anyone else has successfully set up secondary access voicemail access or is having similar issues post a comment to this post

And just to keep us interested Comcast promises a couple new Smartzone features coming soon:

A Smartzone calendar tab
Additional Comcast Digital Voice online calling features
Reading pane preferences
Ability to send email to multiple contacts directly from your address book

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Verizon FiOS vs Comcast

At least once a week now I get a mailing from Verizon trying to get me to switch to FiOS. I do know a couple people with FiOS and from what I have seen and heard there are pros and cons for each service. I have no desire to switch to FiOS but I usually browse through the mailings just out of curiosity. An insert in the mailing this week was touting some of the FiOS features that Comcast does not provide which kind of piqued my interest.

PC meets TV

Use your TV to share photos and music on your computer.

Record it here, watch it there

The Home Media DVR allows you to record a program on one TV and watch it on up to six additional TVs in the house.

While neither of these features are compelling enough to lure me a way from Comcast they are pretty cool. Especially the Home Media DVR, Comcast has a similar feature with ON-Demand where you can start an OnDemand program on one TV and finish it on another. I think in order to do this with a DVR you need a centralized server of some kind so it may be a while before Comcast offers something similar.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Clear Comcast TIVO Hard Drive

I noticed a couple months ago that I had a recording om my TIVO that seemed to be corrupted. I think Comcast refers to these as phantom recordings. I could not play it or delete it although it said that recording was in progress there was no light on the front of the box indicating something was recording. I called Comcast about it a couple months ago, they couldn't figure it out and told me that they would call in a specialized TIVO tech to get back to me. I never heard from them.

It wasn't much of an issue until recently where we started having an issue where recordings on our season pass were not recording and things that were recording were getting deleted after a couple days. I assume these issue are due to the phantom recording so I called Comcast back today for some help. I assumed that they would just send a tech out with a new box. But the tech wanted to try something new.....He said there was a way to delete everything from the hard drive which should fix the issue. For those having similar issues below are the steps I went through to wipe out the hard drive.

On the Comcast Box - Press the power button and then the select button. This will bring up a diagnostics screen
On the TIVO Remote - Press the replay button
Press the TIVO button three times
Press the Live TV button
Press the channel up button

After this sequence is completed the box will reboot. When it starts back up all of the recordings, season passes and other setting should be gone. Time will tell whether this fixes the issues I have been having.

Comcast Online Backup

Over the past couple months I have had a few friends tell me stories of hard drive crashes that caused them to lose thousands of precious family photos and other files on their computers. I thought well, their own fault for not backing it up. Then I realized that much of the pics, music, photos and videos on my PC are not backed up either. In the past I have backed up to CD but I now have so many files that would be too time consuming. So I decided to research backup solutions.

My first potential solution was an external hard drive. Hard drive space is getting so cheap you can now get a Terabyte external hard drive for less than $100. The downside to an external hard drive is that you are not protected against fire or theft. Also, after reading reviews for some of the drives, reliability seems to be a bit spotty as many customers were experiencing problems with drives overheating or just not working. Not going to do me much good if the drive doesn't work.

My next potential solution was online backup services. These services require a monthly fee and many will allow you to backup unlimited amounts if data. You install a small application on your PC which takes an encrypted one-time back up of all your specified files, then will constantly check for new files and automatically back them up as they are created.

This is a great solution. It is easy, secure and relatively inexpensive. I like the fact that you just install the product and it does all of the work for you. The two major players in the online backup industry are Mozy and Carbonite. The products that they offer are virtually identical, just have a little bit different pricing structure.

Mozy offers unlimited backup for $4.95 / month or $59.40/ year. If your backup needs are on the lower end they do offer 2 gigabytes for free.

Carbonite offers unlimited backup for $4.58 / month or $54.95 /year. They offer a free 15 day trial.

While researching these options I came across an article from Jan 2009 that said Comcast would soon be offering an online backup service to their customers. I searched high and low on the Comcast website and could find nothing regarding online backup. So either Comcast has not rolled the product out to my area or they have decided not to roll it out at all. I am leaning more toward the latter as based on the article the pricing of the product was just not competitive.

The article states that the product will offer several storage plans:

10 GB - $49.99 per year
50 GB - $99.99 per year
250 GB - $239.88 per year

For less than the price of the Comcast 10GB plan you can get unlimited storage space from Mozy or Carbonite. I am guessing that Comcast realized this and scrapped the product. Out of curiosity I did a quick search to see if any other ISP offers online backup to their customers and found that Comcast's major competitor Verizon does. They offer plans based on storage space as well but are more competitive that Comcast's theoretical plan.

Verizon Online Backup & Sharing

Online Backup & Sharing/5 GB - $1.99 / month
Online Backup & Sharing/25 GB - $4.99 / month
Online Backup & Sharing/50 GB - $6.99 / month
Online Backup & Sharing/150 GB - $12.99 / month
Online Backup & Sharing/250 GB - $19.99 / month

Verizon's plans are still more expensive than Mozy or Carbonite but they are ahead of Comcast by offering a product. I feel that Comcast is really missing the boat here by not offering competitively priced online backup to their customers. Ultimately I would love to see them partner with Mozy or Carbonite and offer the product to their customers for free like they do McAfee Anti Virus. That would save me the $49.95 /year I am now paying for Carbonite. This would probably also help Comcast retain their customers. If a customer has all of their precious files backed up with the price of Internet service they would be less likely to leave for the competition that does not offer the service for free.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Comcast Universal Caller ID

In various places over the past few years I have seen Comcast advertisements about the ability to see incoming calls on your TV. A couple months ago I got an email from Comcast about a new feature coming soon called Universal Caller ID. This product allows you to see incoming calls on your TV or your PC. At the time the product was not available in all areas and apparently my area was one of the areas that it was not available in, as it was not working.

To enable the cable TV caller id you need to go into the interactive menu. A few months ago when I tried to do this I had no interactive menu. They must have since released a new version of the Guide software, when I went in yesterday a menu selection for Interactive TV was there. So in a few seconds I went in and enabled Caller ID. We tested it out today and it works as advertised. A box comes up at the bottom of the screen with the name and number of the person calling....see below

The second piece of this feature is Caller ID to PC. In order to get this to work you need to install some software. After the software is installed you need to log in using your Comcast account and you get an icon running in the lower right hand corner if your PC. It works pretty much the same as the TV version. See below:

The PC software and additional info can be found at the Link below:

http://www.comcast.net/callerid/

Of course you need to have Comcast Digital Voice in order to get this feature to work. I though the feature was pretty cool but my wife wasn't impressed. I asked if she wanted the software installed on her laptop and she told me no....when I inquired "why" she told me the phone is right next to her laptop she can just look at who is calling there. Oh well, I still think it is cool.

One disappointment was that it did not work on my TV where I have the Comcast TIVO software installed. This is where we do 95% of our TV watching. No info on the site regarding whether they will be updating the TIVO software to include the feature anytime soon.

I continue to be impressed by the new "free" features that Comcast continues to add to their product line. I love to see the products integrating and working together. The features probably will not impress the masses buy we geeks out here really appreciate them.