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In the Wall Street Journal, Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret write for subscribers only, "Apple TV is tiny, just about eight inches square and an inch high, far smaller than a typical DVD player or cable or satellite box, even though it packs in a 40-gigabyte hard disk, an Intel processor and a modified version of the Mac operating system. And it has a carefully limited set of functions."

"Yet, in our tests, it worked great, and we can easily recommend it for people who are yearning for a simple way to show on their big TVs all that stuff trapped on their computers. We tried it with various combinations of Windows and Mac computers, with movies, photos, TV shows, video clips and music. And we didn't even use the fastest wireless network it can handle. It performed flawlessly. "

Mossberg and Boehret continue, "Apple TV isn't for that small slice of techies who buy a full-blown computer and plug it directly into a TV, or for gamers who prefer to do it all through a game console. And it's not for people who are content to watch downloaded TV shows and movies directly on a computer screen. Instead, it's for the much larger group of people who want to keep their home computers where they are and yet enjoy their downloaded media on their widescreen TVs."

Regarding their tests over a basic wireless network with multiple computers, they write, "In our tests, Apple TV performed perfectly in Walt's house over a standard Wi-Fi wireless network with a Pioneer plasma TV and six different computers -- three Windows machines from Hewlett-Packard and Dell, and three Apple Macs. Setup was a breeze, the user interface was clean and handsome, and video and audio quality were quite good for anyone but picky audiophiles and videophiles. We never suffered any stuttering, buffering or hesitation while playing audio and video from distant computers."

Mossberg and Boehret summarize the Apple TV writing, "We've been testing Apple TV for the past 10 days or so, and our verdict is that it's a beautifully designed, easy-to-use product that should be very attractive to people with widescreen TV sets and lots of music, videos, and photos stored on computers. It has some notable limitations, but we really liked it. It is classic Apple: simple and elegant."

All in all a great review from the Wall Street Journal of the Apple TV. Note the limitations have to do with playing back video encoded by codecs -- largely used for encoding pirated films -- that don't adhere to legal video standards and that are difficult for Apple to support due to licensing issues as well as not following certain video standards. More about this issue in much more depth in this somewhat technical but excellent reading article Apple TV: Using DVDs and other Video Sources.

The other limitations have to do not with the Apple TV but with the limited offerings right now on the iTunes Store regarding high-definition movies and 5.1 surround audio. This will surely change soon, but note that the Apple TV does play high definition movies and 5.1 surround audio. Read much more on this in Myth #1 which takes up the entire first part of the two-part article Ten Myths of the Apple TV: 5.1 Audio.

As Edward N. Albro states in his PC World article Review: Apple TV Just Plain Works, the Apple TV is "the first media streaming device I could imagine recommending to a non-geek. And I wouldn't be surprised if it evolves into something even more powerful."

Don't be surprised at all. It will be more powerful. And it will change the way we use our TVs.