In something that I'm sure will be of great interest to the Neuros community, this is a quick hands on operating the LINK using only the tablet. Although there are many Boxee remotes, the official XBMC remote (shown here) is one that can really be used headless without requiring ever turning the TV on. Set the LINK to boot to XBMC, and keep the tablet handy and you can listen to your tunes in the dining room with a couple clicks.

Browsing your own collection is really just the beginning, as you'll quickly see from browsing all the other Android apps, which include queueit which allows you to use queue up youtube videos from your Android device, effectively using youtube as a big jukebox. Between Boxee and XBMC, you've got last.fm, pandora, grooveshark and a host of other apps that contribute to a really rich net radio experience. Now its time to stitch it together to single seamless experience, but its really quite enjoyable today as it is.

So turn off your TV, invite some friends over and listen to some tunes.

Neuros is not getting in the "tablet fray" per se, but as some of you know, we've been looking at Android tablets as a platform to build a touchscreen controller for the LINK (or any PC you like). There are a number of great android apps for controlling Boxee and XBMC, but more on that later. This post is about the tablet hardware itself. In sourcing Android tablets, and we've tested a bunch at this point, we've finally found one we're really happy with.

These tablets are a big step up from the cheaper ones, and the benefit you get from a slightly higher price, well, you get a vastly more usable unit.

• The display is a high quality 4-wire resistive touch display. Its highly stable and gives a 10ms response time, which is even faster than most capacitive displays. Plus, its flexible, you can use it with a stylus, etc if you want (maybe you want to sketch something up, I don't know). Resistive displays have gotten a bad name because there are some really horrible ones, but this one is nice and works well.

• The wifi works well, again, big improvement over the cheaper tablets. The wireless is solid and stays connected to any decent AP.

• The construction is better. The back is textured plastic, the front bezel is anodized aluminum and its generally a nicer construction than the cheaper ones.

Overall, this is a good starting point for our controller, the price is not much higher for the big improvement in quality and usability and I feel comfortable that folks will get use out of these and have some fun hacking or playing around with them. They are available on our store for $129.99

We've just quietly released the 3rd generation of the Neuros LINK and we've made some nice enhancements that make this the best LINK yet.

1. Optimized for web video, both in the future and as it is today. The LINK can play virtually every web video out there using standard web browsers, with Adobe Flash, HTML5 or whatever else comes this way, and now you have your choice of Google Chrome or Firefox (even the beta Firefox 4 if you are so inclined).

Mashable recently posted an article With Google TV Looming, Can the Boxee Box Prevail? It was almost rhetorical because Mashable clearly can't see how it will. I tend to agree with them, but I'll take it one step further. Why would we want dedicated hardware of any kind at this stage? Lets assume that Google TV will run on a PC as we've speculated. Let's further guess that the Google TV hardware will cost $200.

@browndamon : And the Nobel Prize in Futility Goes to... Makers of New Web-TV Boxes http://bit.ly/99NBra #bnet #webtv #litl #vudu #boxee #appletv #neuros

It's only natural that the above would be said, and there's no doubt that Google's entry into this space could, and hopefully will, change everything. This space, as we have often discussed, is in desperate need of a shakeup. Of course, Google's entry is no surprise and we posted on it first over two years ago. The question now is how well did we anticipate and position ourselves, and what should we change? Lets start with our current assessment:

Steven Johnson wrote an interesting provocative article in the NY Times about whether or not Apple's success should make us re-think the "gospel that an open web will win." My gut tells me that openness will win in the end (I guess no one would be surprised by this view).