It's not saying when you'll be able to get your hands on the thing, but set-top box maker 3view today gave advance notice that it will begin taking advance orders for its Freeview HD box next week.

We should point out that while the 3view unit picks up Freeview HD broadcasts, it's not - yet - officially licensed to use the Freeview name and logos, which is why you won't spot them on its website.

3view's machine will be priced at £299, which gets you a net-connected two-tuner DVR with a 320GB hard drive on board.

The company promises BBC iPlayer support "soon" and last week announced it was building Sky Player in too. It'll connect to YouTube out of the box - provided, of course, you hook it up to a router through its 10/100Mb/s Ethernet port.

Local content on the network can be accessed through UPnP/DLNA, and the 3view box has a pair of USB 2.0 ports for hooking up hard drives and the like.

Tapping into the app trend, the 3view supports on-screen widgets, with Facebook and Twitter applets bundled from the word go.

3view will begin taking orders on 7 April. ®