When clicking on a specific city, it provides a 5 day weather forecast:

News feeds are also a nice feature available to you. The initial news feed screen caters to your choice of news provider:

To get more detail from your specific news provider, it provides crucial headlines:

A crucial weakness that doesn't complete the Monueal IMedian as a true media centre software is its lack of TV recording capabilities. In order to record a TV show, you would program the show to record much like a traditional VCR ensuring that you have the channel, time slot and appropriate repeat times setup. It lacks the intelligence and built in TV guide that makes current PVR's in the market modern.

As a comparison, Windows MCE allows you to record a TV show either by selecting it off it's built in guide, searching for it and even has the intelligence to determine whether or not you want to record a rerun of a show.

The one feature that stands out to me is the sleep mode function. Sometimes, I like to sleep to music and found many a nights where I would have to wake up and turn off my Windows MCE manually. The sleep feature is a refreshing feature that should be available if one is serious about turning a PC to replace your stereo.

Conclusions

The Monueal IMON Ultra Bay is a nice idea to fulfill the concept of a PC as a home entertainment appliance. Its display and interface definitely gives it a very nice look and touch.

However, the bundled remote is clumsy and non-responsive. A remote control is the main user interface regardless of how nice the Monueal IMON Ultra Bay can feel.

Despite its large LCD display and well laid out buttons, the Monueal IMon Ultra Bay takes up two 5.25" drive bay space and might of concern small media centre cases in the market. In addition, the excessively long cabling was a bit of a stretch for my regular size PC let alone having to fit all this into a small media center case. Cooling might also be compromised.

On the whole I found using the Monueal IMedian software too clumsy and confusing compared to other media center software on the market such as Windows MCE. Its lack of search functions, advanced TV recording features and nested features might confuse a user new to the concept of a media centre PC.

Find out about this and many other reviews by joining the Weekly PCstats.com Newsletter today! Catch all of PCSTATS latest reviews right here.

Related Articles
Here are a few other articles that you might enjoy as well...
- Samsung UN55C7000 55-inch 3D LCD HDTV Review
- Samsung LN55A950D1F 55-inch LED-backlight LCD A950 HDTV Review
- Samsung LN52A850S1F A850 52-inch LCD HDTV Review
- Samsung LN40A650A 40-inch LCD HDTV Review
- Samsung HLN617W 61-inch DLP Television Review
- Samsung LTM405W Tantus 40" LCD Television Review
- Samsung SPL4225 Tantus 42 inch Plasma Display Review
- Samsung DVD-L100 Portable DVD Player Review
- Samsung Tantus HCL473W 47" Rear Projection HDTV
- Samsung DVD-P401 DVD Player Review