The Apple TV device, which was announced last year, hyped at MacWorld in mid-January, and set to ship in February has now been officially delayed until March, according to Reuters and News.com (one of TechRepublic’s sister sites). In early February, the ship date was pushed to Feb. 28. Now, Apple is saying that it’s going to be around the Ides of March.

“Wrapping up Apple TV is taking a few weeks longer than we projected and we now expect to begin shipment mid-March,” an Apple spokesman told News.com.

Once it is released, TechRepublic will have one, and we will put it through its paces. If you’ve seen what we did to the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3, then you already have an idea what that will entail.

TechRepublic will also be examining the Apple TV for uses beyond its standard job, as George Ou talked about when Apple TV was officially announced last month. We’ll let you know whether this thing could truly be hacked into use as a firewall, Linux server, or potentially even a Windows Media Center.

As far as its standard use as a mini media server, I am a serious skeptic. With a 1 GHz processor, 256 MB of RAM, and a 40 GB hard drive, I think this device is seriously under-powered for multimedia. The hard drive is a big problem. Because of its low storage capacity, the Apple TV will probably end up streaming much of its music and video over a wireless connection from home PCs running iTunes. That could result in choppy playback and failed file access. If that happens regularly, then this device will be a big frustration to users.