Gadgetory

I'm David Connolly executive editor cnet.com and I'm here with the two news sling box models there's the sling box 500 which lists for $300 and the sling box 350 which lists for $179 they look very different the sling box 350 looks like it could almost be related to the jawbone jam box while the 500 has kind of this little wave design in case you don't know what sling box does it allows you to stream video from a video source such as a cable box or a satellite box or any video source and stream that remotely to a tablet smartphone laptop of course how well these stream depends on your internet connection at the source as well as where you're streaming from but these do work very well as long as you have a decent internet connection these do stream 1080p signals the major difference between the two boxes is that the higher-end 500 has built-in Wi-Fi it also has an HDMI pass-through port that allows you to connect this to your cable or satellite box via HDMI one of the problems however is those boxes often output a signal that is copy-protected which prevents you from actually seeing the video so Slingbox recommends that you also connect this via component video because the 500 does have that HDMI out and can do the sling projector it does come with a remote that allows you to control that feature and to control the on-screen menus both these boxes have built-in IR blasters so if you set them on top of your cable box they should change the channels remotely so the big question is which box should you get and is it worth it to step up to the 500 model I would say for some people it won't be we are recommending 300 does everything that the fiber does however the one scenario where I think it'd be very important to step up to the 500 is if you do need that Wi-Fi connection one other small thing worth mentioning there is a USB port on the back of both of these devices for the moment anyway Slingbox hasn't said what that you speed port is going to be used for but it is reserved for future features in closing we've been big fans of Slingbox since the beginning and both these boxes take it up a notch particularly with the built-in Wi-Fi on the Slingbox 500 they're both good devices and they both worked well in our test those are the Slingbox 500 and the Slingbox 350 I'm David Carr noise thanks for watching