Ongoing Zonbu mini Review ...

Last update: June, 22th, 2008

I got my Zonbu box in August, 2007 and I have been using the system a lot. Here you find my impressions that I update from time to time.

This review only covers the first Zonbu, the "mini".

The Zonbu team changed their pricing model several times ... so this review might contain pricing or subscription modells, that do not exist any more!

Web browsing

The Zonbu is attached to a flatscreen TV in our living room and is used with a wireless keyboard. Perfect for occasional browsing when the "main" computer in our family is used. Performance is great and all the needed plugins work very well. (Not good at all is the performance of Adobe flash player based videos!)

Greenness

The TV eats about 135 watt ... so this setting is actually not very green, I have to confess ... (Do not overestimate the amount of energy, you will save with the Zonbu. Sure, the box needs only 15 watts, BUT the datacenter where your data is saved, needs energy too, and it runs all day and night .... In my opinion the energy saving that you achieve with a Zonbu can easily be topped by introducing three or four energy saving light bulbs in your house or apartment!)
In the meantime (June 08) the Zonbu team has more or less abandoned the "green factor" anyway and tries to position their product new.

Music

For testing reasons I stored about 13 GB or 2300 files of mp3 files on the Zonbu. This was about 50% of our collection.

The big problem with having your mp3 files in the online storage is that it takes Zonbu time to download them before the music starts playing. To wait 5 or 10 seconds till a pop song starts might be tolerable, but it really gets annoying with larger files when listening to classical music. (Each set of the Brahms symphony, to which I am just listening, is about 20 MB in size. This leads to quite a break between sets ....)

And even in pop music are many albums where the different tracks blend in on another ... so the break between tracks is not acceptable (I had this experience the other day with: Genesis - The lamb lies down on broadway).

We run the Zonbu on a 6 MBit / sec DSL line. Most of the Zonbu target group will not have a faster access I suppose and so they will share similar waiting experiences.

So I practically stopped using Banshee for listening to music and now use the following setup:

All our mp3 files sit on a linux NAS device nslu2 that streams the music into our network using the protocoll mt-daapd . On the Zonbu box I installed the daapd client "Get it together" . (I had to become user root to install the client software on Zonbu.) So we now have immediate access to allmost 6000 songs ... but the Zonbu hosts only the client software, to play them and not the mp3 files.

In the meantime there even exists a flash based player for daapd called "FirePlay", that you can find on the daapd website. If you use that player, you do not have to install the daapd client sofware on your Zonbu.

Zonbu has enough power to run the java based music player in the background and to browse the web with Firefox at the same time.

Digital Photos

I do not use the Zonbu for storing digital pictures. For photos, that I want to have online, I use flickr. (For a fraction of the Zonbu price ... a year of flickr with unlimited amount of space is about $25,- From flickr you can order prints and you can do nice online slide shows. )

Editing of digital photos: Zonbu comes with Gimp which can do a lot of things ... but I always forget how to do them. I stick to photoshop elements on my XP machine.

I use the Zonbu box to watch and show the pictures that I have in flickr ....

Documents and spreadsheets

I do not use the Zonbu for office work or storing confidential documents. An online account, that is only secured with a password, does not seem very hard to break in. For documents with no private and confidential info I prefer Google Docs by far over Zonbu because you can call it from any available internet access and are not doomed to have the box at hand. (In the last days Adobe and Microsoft both anounced that they would offer free online office services ... so the quality of those tools will improve over the next months .)

Videos / Movies

I do not use the box for storing or watching movies or videos. We have a dvd player attached to the TV, that is enough for us. (I ocasionally watch youtube, which works well on the Zonbu.) Unfortunately, the performance of flash based videos / movies is very bad!!!

Filesharing

Zonbu comes with some filesharing tools, which I never used. (Personally I think that someone who is in filesharing will never ever be willing to pay 13 - 20 per month for a Zonbu subscription plan any way ... but may be I am wrong.)

Skype

National and international calls have become extremely cheap in Germany. So there is really no need for Skype here ...

Networking and Connectivity

The box is attached via ethernet cable to our home network. It get it's ip settings via dhcp. Works flawless. The smb integration in our Windows Workgroup works flawless.

Printing

The box is connected via the network to our Windows XP machine and uses the laser printer attached to it.

Stability

In the beginning I encountered twice the situation that login to the Zonbu was not possible any more. If I understand correctly the reason was a bug in the cache file system: It always happened when I copied to much to the little machine. The local filesystem became full, you could not start new programs. After reboot you could not login any more. Quite a hassle.

When it happened the first time, I was help within a day via email (but what would I have done if I had not had a working hazle free Windows XP machine around?).

The second time I solved the problem with a hard reset. Worked well and fast ... but after that the root privilege that I had installed, had been gone ....

Otherwise the stability is as good as on my Windows XP machine. In the meantime I use 7.1315. The problem seems to be solved.

Conclusion

I like the Zonbu a lot. For me it is the perfect frontend device for browsing the web, watching and showing my digital photos and listening to mp3 files.

I will not use the Zonbu to store personal documents on it and I will not use it for collecting and edition digital pictures (too slow, do not like gimp).

I will use it to listen to music, but as explained it will only be used as a player, while the mp3 files will be streamed from a different device in our network.

What I do not like is the 1:1 user / box relationship: you have to have your personal Zonbu and only your account can use this machine. So you need a Zonbu for Mom and one for Dad and one for every kid .... not very practical and not very "green" either. This is one more reason why I do not store data on the Zonbu. For me it is just a frontend device.

So in the future the upgrade plan for $ 3.95 would be sufficient for me. (This plan does not exist any more - for me the free "Zonbu free Open Source" modell would be perfect. It gives you free upgrades and updates AND even backups 250 MB of data remotely for you. For the way I use the Zonbu, this would be enough ...)