Funny enough, Ive just slammed B&O via a Customer Satisfaction Survey on the Halo I purchased a couple of months ago. I did purchase the Halo primarily to control volume via WiFi on the BL90s but its a very under-developed product that could be so much better if B&O put the effort in towards the useability rather than a nice clicky wheel volume controller. With the device right in front of me now…..
- Approach and this is the Theatre display automatically shown Photo (Halo1)
- Press either the < or > and the Theatre asks for a USB stick to be inserted.
- Volume control indication. No numerical display only a % of a tiny circle. Should match the source display.
- There is no direct source selection. Swipe up, and you have photo (Halo4) but that is only favourites.
- From the initial display (Halo1), Swipe down in live TV mode, no TV guide button, no keypad.
- Swipe down again (Halo3) – Now you can select source
- When selecting source – say Oppo DVD, you cannot control unless you thumb up back to the display in photo Halo2. Even then, limited controls compared to the BR1
- Swipe down to the next level, you can decide to go to single or multiple B&O Standby.
- Whenever you swipe up/down, the screen defaults to Halo1 after 5 seconds – so almost useless?
- Power. I think for £700, the Halo should have had either a proper (BEO5/6) dock, or as a minimum, a Qi charger as standard. I purchased THE EXACT Qi charger as the B&O one for £13. B&O wanted +£100. Really?
I think the Halo has all the potential to be a killer remote. It just seems to me B&O wanted a bit of high-value tactile hardware out there but with zero consideration to the usefulness or the interaction of a standard customer? Further, given the development of Software over the years, and what has been done with Beoliving Intelligence, how difficult would it be for B&O to include an IPconfig page to configure your own Halo settings (without BLI) or just drag and drop from the iOS app?
B&O just didn’t put any real effort into this.
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