I'm in the fortunate position of owning both the FreeAgent and it's direct competitor, the Wester Digital media player. There are three key featurs that the FA lacks that could be fixed with future firmware upgrades (PLEASE Seagate!)
1) As mentioned elsewhere in these forum posts, a stop/resume feature is really essential! The unit's functionality is really limited by not having this quite basic feature.
2) Please, support for MP3 ID3 tags, particularly embedded album art, would be great.
3) The ability to "switch off" the preview feature when looking for videos to watch. I have a 1TB drive with literally hundreds of movies on it, and when I am scrolling through looking for a movie it's extremely annoying that the FA pauses all the time to show you a preview.
While we're at it a general Menu presentation spruce up would be nice - the Western Digital menu is miles ahead. For example with the WD you don't have to navigate to the folder(s) where your files are. Just select what you want (video, pictures or music), and the WD scans the drive and presents you with your titles.
After having said all this, I actually prefer the FreeAgent over the WD as it has one key advantage for me: Component video output. The Western Digital only has HDMI or Composite, and my TV does not have HDMI inputs. Also the Western Digital only outputs Dolby Digital 2 channels, not 5.1 like the FA - a fact only mentioned in the WD's fine print too!
So, hopefully the powers that be at Seagate read these fora and take note of us, the paying customers suggestions. If they can add the above features (along with some support for more file types too?) through future firmware upgrades this will be a killer Media Player!
