I upgraded my 722 and 612 to a single Hopper (S211) and 3 Joeys (S263) on 5/11/12. The upgrade went quite smoothly, but my user experience has been challenging. When it is working correctly it is great. When it's not it can be quite frustrating.
Here are some of the issues I've experienced in just these few days.
Hopper:
Locks up or becomes quite slow. Sometimes a soft reset works, other times a hard reset is needed.
Guide not available. Soft reset seems to bring it back. Don't know why the guide becomes unavailable. Weird.
No ability to create a manual timer. Bummer. Dish - please fix this.
No way to delete or hide PTAT programs. Dish - please fix this.
AutoHop - very nice when it works. Inconsistent in when it works. Example, start a program and enable AutoHop and it works. Stop the playback, then later resume and AutoHop option may or may work. Also, fast forward sometimes seems to disable AutoHop.
8 character limit for a list name. Really? Also, default is upper case. Must use number keys on remote to get lower case (works like texting from cell phone). Hint: the 1 key is the apostrophe - but with the 8 character limit it's of little use.
Watching PTAT while recording. With about 75 minutes left to record it locked up everything. Hard reset to watch shows, but no recording from that point on. It did not restart the PTAT recording (or any timer recordings, either).
EHD - works but some programs that I transferred to the DVR do not play (error 04). Since they are no longer on the EHD, have to presume they are lost. This may be due to the programs having been recorded on the 722 and transferred to the Hopper.
Defaults to "watch" instead of "close" - that will take some getting used to.
"My Recordings" sometimes get mixed up. The folder will show one program but the description or the program itself will be something else.
Joeys:
Sometimes take a long time to display a picture.
Hopping onto a tuner sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Got to play around with different tuners to get a picture.
Sometimes no picture and nothing working. Hard reset needed.
No guide - got message "Unable to view guide - no date set". Hard reset of the hopper to correct this condition.
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Okay - with all of that being said, I still like the Hopper/Joey. I may have made a mistake going with one hopper and 3 Joeys - so I may be looking to swap out a Joey for a Hopper. PTAT with AutoHop is the best. I like that all primetime programs are recorded - no more schedule conflicts and no more missing the last minute or two of a recorded program because a timer kicked in before a program was finished (shame on the networks for playing that little game).