The AC Ryan Veolo manages to deliver something unique right out of the box. By using the Android OS, it manages to offer a range of features usually not present in most media hubs/players. With the operating system you get all the advantages of a Marketplace, fully fledged browser, media playback, connectivity and the access to all the usual services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and much more. On top of that, you may stream your media files from pretty much anywhere to your big screen TV. Thanks to the USB connectivity and card reader, you should also be able to easily rummage through your external hard drive or SDHC card to show off clips or pictures to your loved ones.
Another real gem is the unique remote control. Instead of limiting your control of the Android OS, AC Ryan has gone a long way to offer a very good method to move the pointer around, while also offering a fairly spacious keyboard on the other side to type URLs, short emails or messages. Such a new input device does however have a few shortcomings: there is no pinch and zoom, something the technology is capable of as we have seen at the uWand stand at CES 2012. On top of that, the Alt button - which activates the top row of red numbers and symbols - stays on once pressed, instead of only being active for a single button press. These two aspects make it a bit hard to use, as every other keyboard equipped device in your life, be it a PC (Alt = Shift), Cell phone, tablet, handle this functionality differently.
The Veolo is an excellent unit, but AC Ryan could make it perfect, by adding 300 Mbps Wifi, HDMI 1.4 and USB 3.0 to the mix. Nevertheless, the Veolo revolutionizes the rather repetitive media player landscape and will be quite interesting to see if AC Ryan will keep the unit updated with the Android software.