Rumour Mill

There's lots of rumours about what's going to happen with the 8320HD and here's a selection of them for you to peruse.

• IP Vision/Fetch TV customer support seemingly have the ability to remotely access your 8320HD and possibly change its config, update its firmware and who knows what else. They even have the gall to brag about this on their Web site (see the Device Management paragraph). One user in AVForums.com actually posted that Fetch TV changed their 8320HD's config remotely, so it appears to be more than just a rumour. You've got to wonder what else they're snooping around in users' 8320HD boxes for (USB/DLNA files, remote control presses, my viewing habits to be sold on for targeted ads, sniffing/attacking other machines on your LAN, etc) - the mind boggles! Thanks to a couple of AVForums.com users for spotting this
• A forthcoming firmware release will supposedly feature a completely rewritten user interface. A very early sneak preview was on Five's Gadget Show and luckily the video is indeed on the Five Fwd site. How many bugs the new UI will have is left for the reader to guess, but in the meantime, you can read up a little bit more on the new UI.
• There are rumblings that the new UI will coincide with an updated 8320HD model - probably with a new model number too. At least the remote control will be revised, but I'd also suggest to Fetch TV that they go to 500GB for the internal drive. Although existing 8320HD users will get the new UI, any release of new models tempts most manufacturers to quickly drop firmware updates for older ones, even if obvious/critical bugs still remain (I'm lookijng at you, Liteon).
• Fetch TV are consdering adding "auto-padding" (a user-selectable number of minutes added before and after every scheduled recording), though they haven't commited to it yet.