Software

The Mobile Theater 1.0 utility is supplied with the ASUS W1B00Na notebook. This multimedia application is the most interesting title among the software bundle. It has a user-friendly and intuitive interface that gives you access to options for watching TV channels, playing DVDs or CDs, video clips, and listening to audio-files.

The Theater allows quickly switching between its uses and modes. The main window of the program contains the following controls:

• Watching TV. This opens the TV channels panel with appropriate buttons and submenus. It allows setting up, viewing and recording selected TV channels as well as reproducing and sorting records by name or date.
• Listening to music. This button opens a window where you can play audio and DVD discs as well as MP3 files and radio recordings.
• Video clip playback. This button opens up a window with settings pertaining to video clips and their playback.
• Viewing images. Opens up a control panel where you can view, sort and print pictures stored in the My Pictures folder and make them into slideshows.
• DVD/VCD playback. With this control panel chosen, you can start recording DVD or VCD discs as well as adjust their various settings (choose the language of the movie and the subtitles, configure the speakers and so on).
• Settings. Opens the control panel that allows configuring the Theater at large and each of its modes in particular.

Of course, I was eager to check out the integrated TV tuner in practice. Having installed the Mobile Theater, I plugged the antenna in and started scanning for available TV channels. After a while, the tuner shows me almost all the channels that were available when the antenna was attached to a regular TV-set. The quality of the image is satisfactory; minor noise and some fuzziness only appear when the image is starched to the whole screen as this is not the native resolution of the TV signal. The software allows recording TV channels and capturing a single frame. The enclosed remote control is easy to use and its functions are intuitively understood.

As an additional feature, the number of the selected TV channel and the reproduced CD track are shown on the notebook’s indicators (if ASUS Mobile Theater 1.0 is installed).

So, the integrated TV-tuner has a well-designed interface and good functionality; the quality of receiving and outputting TV-channels is acceptable.