Digital Home Thoughts: Linksys Wants You to Love The Media Hub

"You love your media, so treat it well. The Media Hub makes it easy to organize, access, and share your digital video, photos, and music -- around your home and around the world. With massive capacity, intelligent aggregation, and media optimized file-serving capabilities, it’s an ideal way to manage your material, enjoy your entertainment and share your memories. Show your media how much you love it – give it a Hub."

I can't say I understand or am thrilled by Linksys' attempt to make me love my media, but the Media Hub does look like a decent upgrade from the standard UPnP capable NAS. The Media Hub comes with a lot of services that one would expect from current generation NAS like devices of something with Windows Home Server such as file aggregation, the ability to share your media with friends on the net, automated backups, but what makes the Media Hub stand out from more other devices is the pretty LCD screen that helps you interact with your precious media files via a five way navigation pad. While this certainly is a nice idea on paper, I can't help but wonder if they've done any practical tests. Any computing appliance I have, from a router, to NAS to a wireless webcam is configured and managed through a web interface. I don't think it's necessary to physically be there to change a setting, and the premium that a physical "control panel" usually commands is not worth it to me. Did I mention that it currently retails at Amazon for $429.99 for 1TB? Are you feeling the love?