By Livia Bergovoy

We removed  the Sungale Kula TV Player from the box and charged the unit’s battery. (Charger is included.) It is a handsome black unit with a 4.3″ display.

Once the unit was charged we could set up the clock and wifi without consulting the user guide.

A week later, battery was still partly charged.

When Powered on there is a friendly note on the screen which reads: System is booting, please wait

It takes about 15 to 30 seconds for the system to boot.

The  “home” screen shows wifi signal strength and remaining battery power. Once any selection is made those indicators disappear and the “Return” button needs to be pressed over and over to get back to the home screen if we want to see these gages.

From here on out it was almost all downhill (and not in a fun skiing kind of way).

• Our DSL network receives streaming video consistantly quite well, but the video quality on the Kula TV is pixilated more often than not and is frequently choppy.
• The video/show automatically replays and there is no apparent setting to change that.
• We wish we knew when the shows were taped. The shows are not time/date stamped.
• We wish we knew how long the video/shows are, but there is no apparent indicator.
• There are no forward and back buttons or controls. We intuitively touched the screen for such options, but the screen jumped back to the previous menu. When we pressed the selection we would have liked to continue to watch, it started from the beginning. Again, how long is the show????
• The touchscreen seems to need hard presses. This is unusual, i.e., Droid X, Droid Incredible, and other touchscreen devices today offer a sensitive touch experience. We found that this unit responded better to the tip of a pencil’s eraser.
• As of this review, there is a very small sampling of shows.

The only good news is that the sound quality is good and very good with a standard headset.

Overall, this is not a fun device!