I had 5 bars of 3G signal (a miracle in downtown Denver) and was able to connect to my machine within seconds. I was at a local professional society banquet last night, and sneaked out while some awards were being handed out. The 3G connection actually works quite well. It's a good idea to test the 3G connection to your Mac at least once before you try it on the road. To remotely connect to your EyeTV Hybrid, you need to make sure that the EyeTV application is running on your Mac, and that your Mac has not gone to sleep. All you have to do is set up a 'My EyeTV' account with Elgato, and then enter the same email address and password into the appropriate spaces on the iPhone app. If you're away from your home Wi-Fi network, you can use a 3G connection to do the same thing. If you're on the same network as the Mac running the EyeTV application, the iPhone app recognizes the Mac via Bonjour, and with a single tap you're able to watch live streaming TV, view recordings that you've made using the Mac application, check your recording schedules, and scroll through the channel guide. To stream EyeTV content to your iPhone, you download and install the free EyeTV app. It occurred to me that Apple ought to consider building in a digital TV tuner into the iMac and add software similar to Eye TV 3.0 as a replacement for the Apple TV. I was impressed with the clarity of the images on my 27' iMac, and in full screen mode the iMac looked more like an HDTV than a computer. The latter cable can be used as a way of attaching a camcorder or old VCR to your Mac in order to digitize older videos. There's additional hardware supplied with the EyeTV Hybrid as well - an infrared remote control complete with batteries, a USB extension cable, and a small cable for input of standard definition input from other video sources. The EyeTV software displays three primary screens the actual TV show, a small 'remote control' that shows up on the screen, and a main window that is used to display a program guide (one year's free subscription to TV Guide's program data is included with the EyeTV), set up recordings, and create playlists. That's not particularly surprising to me, since I only watch about 6 of the 600+ channels on cable.

In the Denver area, there ended up being 32 digital TV channels that I could pull in with the antenna, and only about 6 of those seemed to be worth watching. Since I didn't want to incur the expense of running cable up to my office for a review, I purchased an inexpensive digital TV antenna and connected it to the EyeTV. You install the included software on your Mac, plug the EyeTV Hybrid into an available USB 2.0 port, connect cable TV or a digital TV antenna, and then let the EyeTV setup software do its magic. Elgato makes setting up the EyeTV Hybrid a cinch.

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