The crew here at PC Magazine finally got to get our grubby hands on the Apple TV today. (For some reason the WSJ's Walter Mossberg has been playing with it nearly two weeks, which hardly seems fair.) We are putting the device through it paces right now with a variety of media formats and networking environments and will pub a full hands on review very soon. Apple TV is designed to take everything that you can watch, listen to, and enjoy on iTunes and let you do it on your TV. But based on the demo, I can say this. It really does work a lot like an iPod.

The Apple TV syncs in iTunes using an interface that is nearly identical to the one used to Sync iPods. Movies, TV shows, music, and podcasts on your PC can be sync'd over to the 40GB Apple TV hard drive or streamed from your host PC. The streaming seems to work pretty well over a Draft N network, but we will be testing it with the more common G networks today. Music. Interestingly photos can't be streamed, they have to be stored on the Apple TV.

A lot of people are focusing on the ability to buy and play movies on the Apple TV, but I think it should be looked at more broadly than that. This is is an all-purpose media extender that could finally let you enjoy all that media on your PC in your living room. Of course, the trick is actually playing all those formats seamlessly, and efficiently. That is what we are testing now. Stay tuned. The full Apple TV review will be available here soon.