D-Link has announced that its widely anticipated Boxee Box is available for pre-order for $199. The pre-order is being conducted exclusively through Amazon, but international consumers will be pleased to hear that the device will be available in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia.
The Boxee Box by D-Link reinterprets what TV should be. The Boxee Box delivers movies, TV shows, music, and photos from a user’s computer, home network, and the Internet to their HDTV with no PC needed. In addition to video content, Boxee users can access great music from sites like Pandora, last.fm, shoutcast and We are Hunted as well as stunning photos from sites like flickr and Picasa. Additionally, Boxee’s core social features make it easy for friends to discover new content from each other through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and more.
Boxee’s VP of Marketing indicated that the delay from the original June launch was caused by Boxee switching from the previously-announced NVIDIA Tegra 2 chipset to the Intel Atom CE4100 platform (which will also be powering Google TV). The new chip is fully capable of running 1080p video with 5.1 surround sound, so your shiny home theaters won’t be going to waste.
The Boxee Box’s remote are designed as dual-sided RF remote control which has straightforward navigation keys on one side and a useful QWERTY thumb-board on the other. The box will ship with a remote, 802.11N connectivity and the upcoming Boxee 1.0 release. The upcoming 1.0 software will take full advantage of the beefy format support along with HTML5 in a standard Mozilla-based browser.
D-Link’s Boxee Box Remote Screenshot