Customer Reviews

HAVA Wireless HD TV Streaming and Placeshifting Device

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Spent a long time comparing this to slingbox pro.
It's better in terms of features/cost. Used it for a week in pass-through mode for basic cable. Mostly worked great. Occasional disconnects here and there but bearable.

Cheap looking/build - but that wasn't important to me.

Then all of a sudden, it stops working (after over 1 week). Notice that pass through signal to TV is affected. Cannot tune in to certain channels and others have lots of static. TV problems go away when HAVA is removed.

Spent a few days debugging. Notice that pings from my laptop to the HAVA are unreliable. After trying everything, decided enough is enough. I'm an engineer. If it's an easy-to-fix problem and an engineer can't figure it out by following their debugging instructions, it's not worth it. Secondly, even if I figure it out, this should NOT be happening after 1 week of use.

Tried to return it. It's clear they're trying to save time/money by making use of their customers to perform trouble shooting. Instead of taking the unit back and debugging it in-house, they force me to describe my problems/debugging steps to customer support. On top of that the reps English is hard to understand (strong Indian accent).

Long story short, they WILL put you on hold repeatedly and do everything they can to try to make you debug the unit for them. After an hour, I finally had to REFUSE to do any more debugging and DEMANDED to speak to manager. Manager makes me repeat entire description of problem and tries his luck to convince me to debug again. I REFUSE. Finally, I say, look, even if I debug it for you and find the problem, I'm NOT going to keep the unit. If it stops working after a week, it's SUB-STANDARD and I'm returning it. He finally relents.

Story doesn't end here. I get transferred back to rep. Rep says he'll email me the RMA number in 2 hours. Never happens. Next day, I call back. He says, they're "discussing the return case with sales". What? Sales has to approve a return? So still no RMA.

Day 3. I call back and ask for RMA. A new floor manager then tries to make me repeat the entire problem description all over. I blow my top. I tell him the website clearly says Hava has a 30 day money back guarantee IF YOU'RE NOT SATISFIED. It doesn't say the return is contingent on me debugging the bloody device for them. Manager says, "fine, fine, no problem, I have your RMA here .... but wait ... I have one more thing for you ... we'd like to send you a replacement. I yell at him saying I've had enough. Give me my RMA # now or else you'll be hearing from my lawyer. Manager relents and finally gives me the RMA number.

Summary: The features on this product are awesome. But they have serious issues with quality and secondly, they do NOT know how to do business in the US. They have no understanding of how to treat customers. My guess is they're foreign and don't understand how to do business in the US. You don't make your customers do the work of your quality control engineers. Sheesh. What a nightmare.

The Hava Wireless HD Installed and setup quickly with little effort. I was able to stream the video within my network in a matter of a few minutes. Although it was in those few minutes that I realized that the Hava Wireless HD does not have an HD Tuner. The built in tuner is a standard definition (SD) and does not receive the HD signals.
It would seem to me that the claims made for this product do not live up to what the product does.

1.Hava adds a network transfer stack on your NIC and often screws up your PC's non-Hava transfer abilities. Uninstalling hava net-drivers is the cure.

2.Does not work well behind firewall. No tool from Hava to troubleshoot WAN streaming issues.

3.No way to install only the HAVA-Palyer. It comes bundled with tons of primary installation softwares and have to install all of them from the top to get the player installed.

4.The Wirelss capabilities are very lame, no way to have this work as AP.
I guess they are working on making Hava wireless secure.

5.The Hava set-top box front lights are lame. 3 lights with No label/text. Only they know what these lights means. No documentations.

Its more of waste of time to make this thing to work then the onetime cost of 190-250. A true tech nightmare.

This product looks nice on a brochure and website. But does not deliver in quality and reliability. I brought the Wireless HD model from the website about a month ago. It never has worked fine. I get Comcast expanded basic. The HAVA box was not able to scan the 100 channels. The device only recognised the Basic channels (11 channels ) and a few expanded basic channels.

WORST piece of tech I have EVER bought. Burn your money rather than buy this horror you will be happier. I threw mine in the trash.