To fully appreciate the Netgear EVA700, the following items need to be in place: a home network (wired or wireless - up to 'g' speed - will do), including storage with UPnP support, a bucketload of media to stream and a willingness to tolerate a selection of foibles that mar an otherwise extremely useful piece of kit.

The unit is designed to sit under your television - to which you can hook it up with SCART, composite or component, but not HDMI - and possibly hook up to your speakers too. That done, and once you've gone through a fairly straightforward, wizard-driven, on-screen setup, you're free to watch video (and the main video formats are supported as standard), listen to music and view images using media stored on your network. Incidentally, if you're one of the few who've taken Intel up on its Viiv platform, that's fully compatible too and this should, in theory, streamline your installation.

We opted to test the unit in a wireless network environment and so once we'd pointed the twin antennae up and entered the appropriate security key, the EVA700 fairly quickly picked up a NAS box we were using to store our media. From there, the on-screen menu invited us to choose between video, audio and photo, and then took us to the folder hierarchy on the drive. Using the remote control, we then chose the file we wished to run, hit Enter, and sat back. Alternatively we could have availed ourselves of the USB port on the front, which allows you to load up some media on a flash drive and connect it directly to the machine.

Even with a fairly weak wireless signal, the dual antennae happily streamed DivX movies with no disruption and while fast forwarding and rewinding couldn't take place until the EMA700 had taken an index of the file, even that worked reasonably well.

But there are problems here, the first of which presented itself when we switched the player off after playback; when we came to start the EVA700 up again, it hung. We also experienced, over the course of a two week test, the unit hanging when it briefly lost the wireless signal and as there was no available firmware update, we have to mark this down as an unwelcome flaw.

It doesn't help that when the machine does hang or lose its network connection, you're likely to find yourself pulling the power lead out every now and then just to get the machine to properly reset. That's hardly modern day convenience. And as a simple restart often solved many of the problems we met, it was a shame that there wasn't an obvious alternative way to restart the machine that didn't involve tapping the network details back in.

The EVA700 sits in a growing field, lacking the elegance perhaps of a Pinnacle ShowCenter, but undoubtedly scoring as a very useful gadget. In spite of the fact that we've spent a weighty paragraph or two chalking up points against it, it's still a piece of technology we liked very much, and would happily stump up the necessary cash for.

That's not to say we warmed to its rough edges, nor to the stark if functional remote control. But keep your eye on the EVA700. A couple of firmware updates could really knock those edges off.

A terrific edition to a home media network, hampered by some unwelcome niggles. It could still be worth investing in, though.