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Now that finals, Christmas, New Years, birthday parties, and a laptop hard drive failure are all out of the way, I’m finally ready to bring you all the first part of my ThinkFlood RedEye review.  Today I’m looking simply at the hardware because this application is so complex that I’m going to break this down into multiple parts.  So read on past the break to see my impressions of this from a hardware perspective.

P.S. Thanks to ThinkFlood for the press photos since all of my photos were lost in the failure of my laptop’s hard drive.  They took much better photos than I could ever hope to! :)

The unboxing was a very pleasant experience.  There is no other way to describe it.  I was reminded of the iPhone unboxing experience when doing this.  Upon lifting the top of the box off, I was greeted with the RedEye device right on top in a custom fit tray.  Below that was the manuals and 2 smaller boxes that contained the dock’s adapters for the various iDevices that are supported and another box contained the AC adapter.

The device itself feels very high end and very solid to me.  There isn’t much to it really.  It contains an IR transmitter/receiver, Wi-Fi adapter, and a dock for your iPhone/iPod.    The top is a solid glossy black plastic and the sides and bottom are a transparent blue plastic as you can see in the top photo.

One issue I struggled with is where can I put this where it is convenient for me to dock my iPhone, out of the way of other various things in the living room, yet still able to “hit” every device on our TV stand.  I finally settled on an end table next to the couch however there is one minor issue.  Both the couch and end table have been moved for our Christmas tree temporarily.  Until things are back to normal, I’m moving things around as needed but I think my permanent home will be a good one for the RedEye.

Out of the box, the RedEye is configured to run its own ad-hoc network that is simply called RedEye.  After you download the RedEye app from the App Store, you will need to connect to that network first, then open the RedEye app, and the recommended practice is to have the RedEye connect to your home wireless network, this way you can still access the internet while using the RedEye.  If this doesn’t matter to you, feel free to leave it on the default wireless settings.

At first, I wondered to myself, why the heck does this thing need a dock in it?  I was then reminded of how much Wi-Fi sucks down your battery.  Now I realize that this was a very smart decision.  People like me will want a place to sit their phone down when you aren’t changing the channel, so just dock it!

If I were to make a buy/sell recommendation solely on the quality of the hardware, I would tell you that it is well worth the price of admission.  However there is still the (very extensive) iPhone app to look at so we’ll see here over the next few days how the iPhone app works and performs so check back over the next few days to see my full impressions.  Tomorrow, I’ll give you all a look into the device setup process to get this guy up and running.