Look out Gucci, Milano has been released

The Milano comes in a well-designed box that looks interesting and up-to-date. The blocks of colour, filled with text go a long way to explain what this product does and how it’s better than the competition.

Once out of the box, you’ll find a whole bunch of cables (USB, AV cable, power cable + adaptor and S-Video/YPbPr), the manual, a remote control with batteries, screws and a stand. You’ll also get the Milano itself.

Made out of plastic and weighing it at a poultry 395g minus HDD, it doesn’t have the quality or presence that most peripherals claim. The logo on the side does look pretty good, and if you didn’t know that it was made out of plastic, you would be perfectly happy with it.

The front of the Milano has a plethora of buttons, with the biggest being the power button, below this is the IR sensor allowing the remote to send commands. Beneath this are 8 buttons in columns which consist of play, stop, up, down, left, right, music and setup. All of these will make the built-in media player do its stuff.

On the back you’ll find the PC interface connection which is only USB; no sign of eSATA. There are also ports for the S-Video/YPbPr cable, AV out, optical audio out and the usual power in. As the box has the ability to pump out HD quality pictures, a nice HDMI port could have been in order, but there is still enough connectivity to hook this thing up to your HDTV.

Inside you’ll find where the Milano goes wrong. First of all, you can see circuit boards and wires. While that will far from scare off any knowledgeable person from installation, the usual PC user may be a little reluctant to install something that they have no idea about. Second, you can only use an IDE drive. Considering as SATA was released in 2003, you would have thought that 4 years on, manufactures would support this as standard; not only would there be increased speed, but smaller cabling inside.

Fortunately there are no confusing jumpers or pins to short inside unlike the older Vizo Luxon which needs a little bit of fiddling to get right.

Another major issue is the lack of any kind of cooling whatsoever. The only part where air flow has been considered are the small holes at the rear which are far from adequate. As this will be used to constantly read data from (i.e. a film) the drive is going to start sweating, especially as there are no instructions in the manual to at least allow for ventilation.