I have had pretty good luck with the Hava beta. I bought a Hava Platinum when the beta program was announced. It came on May 8th and I got the software the following day. It's too bad that it has to be configured using Windows, but I dual-booted my laptop into WIndows and configured the Hava and then loaded the Nokia client.

A found a few bugs/problems almost immediately and emailed Hava only to find out that 3 of the four problems I found had already been reported. They fourth was rather trivial (requiring a reboot after installation) in that it only seems to happen when Hava is first installed.

So far, the Hava client has been very usable with a WiFi connection. When the bandwidth drops below a certain threshold. the video freezes and never recovers. This is one of the known bugs that they are working on. I look forward to the next Nokia beta, but I am confident that this will be a fine product.

An added benefit to the Hava is that is had rudimentary support for VLC via an RTSP:// interface. This is the first such device that I can access from various PCs in the house with Linux.

All in all, I'm happy with my Hava and look forward to further improvements from Monsoon. I don't see how a "general-purpose" LInux client can be far behind. It seems to me that it should be easier to make a client for Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, etc. than it is to make a client for maemo. I also have a Mac notebook, so I'm also hoping for a Mac client in the near future.

Oh, BTW, I'm also a Slingbox owner. I'm actually happier with the Hava because it has better support for Linux than the Slingbox does. I have yet to try the Mac Slingbox client.

Just my $.02,

Gary Walborn
gwalborn@gmail.com