David's Musings, a Brit in the Bay

I’ve been waiting a long time for this, but it’s finally arrived. The SlingPlayer Mobile for Blackberry. I installed it onto my Bold and within minutes I was up and running. A very solid and polished application. For those of you who aren’t aware of Sling, take a look at their site here. A Sling box connects to your tuner (in my case my Comcast DVR cable box) and allows you to watch and control said box from anywhere in the world.

I have a trusty original Sling box from a few years ago and credit to Sling, they still support and maintain it. In fact, I’ve just downloaded some new firmware.

The application itself for the Blackberry is a little on the large size at around 1.5MB. If you haven’t got a newer type of Blackberry, you should even go there. Once I installed, I was using it quite quickly. I had one hitch in that you have to use the Windows version of SlingPlayer to configure mobile viewing – you can’t do this with the Mac. So, I had to go and drag out my trusty laptop running Vista! Once I had configured the software, the Slingbox and my Blackberry – I was nearly there! A quick tweak of my router to allow the correct port through for remote viewing and I was there.

Sling make this really easy for you with great FAQs, online help, video – and specific walkthroughs for various routers. The application itself works like a dream over wifi – and also over 3G. It can even at a push with a full signal scrape by on EDGE/GPRS – but not well.

I’m extremely pleased with this and it was well worth the wait – I’m just waiting to see how long it is before mobile operators start getting grumpy about bandwidth…