[thebertster]

Well I'm going to post a little review here for what it's worth as this thread seems to be the most active at the moment.

I have been running RaspBMC on my Pi for quite some time and I donated to the project. When Vero was announced, it sounded like a significant improvement over the Pi and I actually purchased three, one for myself and two as gifts for friends.

I was mildly annoyed at the failure to deliver in the promised timescale while my money was sitting in someone else's bank account.

In any case, all three Veros were delivered this week and here are my initial thoughts:

The unit itself looks very neat. Everything was included in the box, including power supply and HDMI cable. I am pretty disappointed with the quality of the remote control. It may look nice in the photos, but the build quality is poor and it looks and feels very cheap indeed. I appreciate it was designed to a budget, but it's still significantly lower quality than I was expecting.

The Vero so far has played all content I've chucked at it without any issues. I can't complain about that...but then the same content also played perfectly well on the Raspberry Pi.

What is massively disappointing is the performance of the Kodi GUI. After playing with it today, I would say it feels slower and clunkier than RaspBMC on my Pi (on default RaspBMC overclocking settings). Even with the "optimised" OSMC skin (which I really dislike by the way) the GUI is hardly the snappy and smooth interface the developer would have you believe; when I switch to my preferred skin (Bello), and with the same skin settings as I use on the Pi (with animations and fanart backgrounds disabled), it definitely feels slower and clunkier. I was expecting a significant improvement from the higher spec Vero (and having paid significantly more for the privilege).

But at the moment, by far the worst issue is the operation of the remote. It is terrible. Often, button presses do not register. Intermittently, the whole system goes bananas as if hundreds of repeat button presses are processed. Now I did have a similar issue in RaspBMC which was resolved with an option in RaspBMC settings to suppress infrared repeats, but no such option seems to exist here. I could obviously tinker around in advancedsettings.xml, but I shouldn't be having to do that with something that is supposed to be an "out of the box" experience.

In addition, OSMC has crashed multiple times while doing nothing more than navigating through the menus. RaspBMC does the same very rarely (maybe once every few weeks) - OSMC has crashed four times in the last hour.

I have checked with my friend whose Vero arrived yesterday and he is having exactly the same issues with the performance and the remote.

In summary, I can't fault the video playback of the device, but otherwise I am disappointed and right now I'm regretting making the purchase - just not the improvement over the Pi that I was led to expect.