Had my install today. It was scheduled for an arrival time between Noon and 5pm. Then, with the robocall, 1pm to 3pm. Tech showed up around 1:30.
Replaced:
- Hopper w/Sling
- Super Joey
- Two Joey 1.0's
New equipment:
- Hopper 3.0 (came with the newer remote)
- Joey 4K (when it arrived, I was surprised that it arrived with the older remote)
- Two Joey 2.0's (both came with the new remote)
When the tech showed up, I asked him if he had the Hopper 3.0, Two Joey 2.0's and the Joey 4K. He said, "You have a Joey 4K on your order? Uh...I don't have that." So, immediately, he called his warehouse and apparently they came into the warehouse today at noon. So,
someone from the warehouse (not another tech) drove the 4K out to my house to give it to the tech. That's customer service right there.
I asked the tech if he would give me the boxes of Hopper 3 and Joeys so that I could unbox them and get them ready for install while he installed the new LNBs. He had absolutely no problem with that. The LNB install only took about 15 minutes while I unboxed everything and unhooked all of the old equipment. I had already put all of the batteries in the remotes and hooked up the Hopper 3.0 and two Joey 2.0's with HDMI and coax. The only thing I didn't hook up was the power. When he came inside, we went back into the closet to change out the switches (that couldn't have been any more straight forward), and we immediately hooked up power to the Hopper 3.0. Everything went smoothly. While the setup was going on, the Joey 4K showed up, so we put that in place without powering it up.
Once the Hopper 3.0 was setup, I asked the tech if I could keep my old Hopper remote and he said that his company had a meeting about this very subject on Monday and, ultimately, they were
supposed to be getting the remotes back from the customer. However, I was determined to keep my Hopper w/Sling remote as I had transferred all of my settings to the remote last night. I also had moved all of my old recordings to the EHD last night. So, he said it was fine if I wanted to keep my remote. I taught him a few things as this was his second Hopper 3 install. Of course, I started to learn the new GUI. We moved onto setting up the Joey 4K.
By the way, when I say, "We installed the equipment." I really mean, "I installed the equipment." I pretty much hooked everything up and ran the remotes. He was really cool about me running all of the setup and everything.
After the Hopper 3.0 and Joey 4K was set up, we pretty much simultaneously turned on and set up the Joey 2.0's. The first message looked like they had the old GUI, but after they did their software update, they had the new GUI. He did take my old remotes for those Joey 1.0's and left me with the new remotes (which is fine because I use Logitech remotes to run those.)
He left, and that's when I really got to play. I customized the program guide how I liked, created favorites guides, folders, changed a LOT of settings (allow IR remotes, set up PTAT, etc.). Used my old Hopper Remote to transfer settings and timers to the Hopper 3.0 and hooked up the EHD and started the transfer process.
My initial thoughts:
- This entire system is fast! The Hopper 3.0 is a speed demon and the Joey 4K is too. While the Joey 2.0's were a tiny bit slow to respond (although this could be my Logitech Harmony remote sending an RF signal to the IR repeater then to the Joey 2.0.)
- I have to be honest, while the new GUI is visually appealing, I am not a big fan of it yet. It feels like things were moved, just for the sake of moving them.
- Same thing with the remote, not a huge fan. I don't like how things are removed (colored buttons, Fast Fwd and Rewind are the same as the Skip 30 sec. and Skip Back 10 sec. buttons, DVR and Guide buttons along the top of the remote don't make sense as I have to literally move the remote up and down the palm of my hand to reach them and there are no Page Up and Page Down Buttons). Moving the Source buttons to the side of the remote was a good idea though. I do like, however, that the instructional on-screen tips change based on the remote being used. Nice touch.
- The Joey 4K is great too. Since the only 4K content available is $7.99 On Demand Movies, I called Dish to ask them if there was any free content available since I wanted to test it out to see if my TV was compatible with the 4K content. He said, "No problem. I will just give you a voucher for a free PPV movie worth $6.99 for being a valued customer." I informed him that the 4K movies were all $7.99. He put me on hold and came back to tell me that he would just give me a $7.99 credit onto my account and I simply bought The Amazing Spiderman 4K PPV. Again, FANTASTIC customer service Dish! And the 4K worked! I can't wait to see if Netflix 4K will work on my 4K TV as the native Netflix app in my TV doesn't even support 4K. Apparently, my 4K TV doesn't even support the H.265 that Netflix uses to encode/decode 4K content.
- After transferring the timers from my remote to the Hopper 3.0, I had to manually edit each timer to set the Folder to which the recording should go.
- PTAT already worked great tonight.
- Dish Anywhere notified me that my DVR couldn't be found. Then, it automatically found the new Hopper 3.0 on my account and synched right up to it. No problem there.
