So it looks nice but can't cope?
Silly Pure.
A stuttering GUI is pretty much the worst thing you can do, and there's simply no exuse for that in a product in that kind of price range.
Either put faster hardware in there or cut some of the bling.
The doyen of DAB radios, Pure, is to return to its roots - it was once called VideoLogic - and release TV-centric product: a Freeview HD DVR. The unit, called the Avalon 300R Connect, will come in 500GB and 1TB versions and deliver the customary dual-tuner recording functionality: play, pause and rewind live TV; switch …
I don't think it's about faster hardware, it's about writing smart code that prioritises animation frames instead of letting a trivial background process spike CPU use and jitter the animation. Apple & Microsoft know how to do this with low power single core devices. Android Jelly Bean (on my phone) has made huge strides forward in fluidity but it's still not quite there if the phone is thinking about something else.
In short - It's not all about the hardware.
From experience with Pure, this could be good. No PVR has ever been perfect at launch, but Pure have a good track record of understanding issues and making new firmware available, with a proper appreciation of the British market. The fly in the ointment is that two years down the line when its successor is launched, it will be abandoned and they will expect you to buy the new one if you wish to maintain the level of service to date.
Any word on whether that's an optimistically-rendered matrix display on the front, or just a logo? I'd certainly be expecting some visual feedback at that price point.
" Pure have a good track record of understanding issues and making new firmware available"
You are joking aren't you? It took nearly two years after release that "The Bug" DAB radio finally got an update allowing the EPG to work properly and enabling timed recording from the EPG. Although that was a feature "on the box". They even released a "fix" at one point that buggered up the EPG completely. You only have to look at the past DAB/Pure forums to see what people thought of them.
Same here, DMX mini system CD player started skipping after 14 months, then the DAB radio started losing its tuning memory randomly (both common faults judging by Amazon reviews). PURE's only repsonse was to offer a discount on a newer PURE product - and that discount was more than Amazon's normal price anyway. No more PURE products for me.
short of playing them into an analogue VCR?
And why do we have to put up with this dreadful horizontal style EPG? I just want a list of programmes for one channel at a time, going down the screen, left or right to see the previous or next channel, and numbers to go directly to a channel.