Personal appearance can be a sensitive issue sometimes, but I’m going to have to risk hurting my TV cable box’s feelings in order to get this out of the way: It’s ugly. Not necessarily the box itself, though its remote does seem to resemble a big, rubbery club. I mean its interface is ugly. The thing is capable of delivering great-looking HD programming, but the controls and interface you have to deal with to get there look like they’ve been stuck in time for a decade or more. And whatever kind of processing hardware is rendering these four-color graphics, it seems to suffer plenty of lag.
