iTV was easier to type.

For the first time in a while, I'm an early adopter. I usually talk a good line--"Yeah, I'm gonna buy the iPod nano TODAY, and I'm camping out for the Macs with Intel too!"--but in actual fact, the purchase usually comes quite a bit later. But not so this time; yesterday at 3:30 I shouldered my bag of provisions, kissed my wife goodbye, and journeyed into the wilds of the Columbia Mall to hunt an Apple TV.

I returned an hour and a half later, trophy in hand, and immediately hooked it up to our gigantic (in depth, not screen size--it's a tube, y'see) HDTV via a horribly expensive HDMI cable. The device found our WiFi network instantly, I entered the WEP encryption code and then a shorter code to identify the iTunes on our iMac, and ba-ding, it began syncing to our iTunes library instantly.

Many people have complained that the resolution of the video sold by the iTunes store doesn't look very good on an HDTV. To me, it looks no worse than your average DVD, and that's good enough, given that we don't have a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player. But I did a quick test with one of my animations, specially rendered in HD for the occasion, and ta-da! it worked!

Karyl had just finished reading James Patterson's Along Came a Spider, so she was hinting strongly that we should buy the movie from iTunes--as a test case, don'tcha know--so, what the hell, we did. Although we only watched about half of it, being tired parents and all, we were pleasantly surprised to discover it streamed perfectly over 802.11g, no n required.

Coming up later--results of experiments in converting HD content! Can Apple TV actually play more formats than advertised?