Google TV - Android meets the big screen

GOOGLE TV IS AMAZING

Android for Google TV is rather amazing, its ability to hook a lot of sources quickly is nothing short of impressive. There was no equivalent to benchmark such devices

We got the Sony 46" Google TV and the Logitech Revue, they are in fact the first of their kind as a consumer product.

In too many ways its not possible to even assess it without a couple months of living with it.
All other systems that claim "Internet" are really not open to the whole web, but have the same behavior as Apple products with closed VPN type access to apps that must be "signed and credentialed" by the manufacturer.

Google TV is therefore the First OPEN yet dedicated-to-TV embedded system of its kind. Basically it took guts to launch this platform and it only gets better from here.

Stats-wize there is a rather large difference between the Logitech Revue and the Sony 46" TV... The Sony has 3.7 gigs of ram available to it, the Revue has barely 700 megs.

DESIGN FOR TV
http://code.google.com/tv/web/docs/design_for_tv.html
One of the problems inherent in any open system that can go anywhere into the web... there will be problems with content and page code, and of course, Flash. The iPad is probably the worst at this... where Steve Jobs says "It Just Works" but users say "It just works Badly" and Apple basically levys a demand to the world that all websites should be changed to HTML5 just to deserve the attention of an iPad owner. Time has shown that arrogance to fail the smell test totally. In some ways the Google TV situation falls into this paradigm, where you can go anywhere but "Designed for Google TV" is a desired outcome as presented by Google.

We did a lot of testing and page creation, hybrid stuff with both std HTML, Javacript HTML5 for CSS and canvas tricks and combinations of both. We will roll out some demos in 2011.

This below is at http://s4.madmenmag.com for Google TV - note that its full screen flash and runs quite well in Android. This was a real project for AMCTV found at
http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/season-4-fashion-gallery/

A hybrid Google TV site is here : http://the-charlie-hotel.com Charlie Chaplin's bungalow compound in Hollywood, with flash , html and wordpress. Boht Sites use Level 3 CDN and Google Analytics, powered by engines suited to google TV use-case. ( Arrow Keys on remote will turn pages.. etc ) - we found Flash to run rather well when done properly.

Android or Google TV software is quite good and they have a lot to be proud of in how well they attended to interface handling with 3rd party hardware makers. We think the problems lie soley with the CPU SOC chosen.

We ran cold on one issue only .. the Intel Atom Processor is just not powerful enough and they knew it going in. For 1920 x 1080 screens you must deliver performance in full screen bitmap movements and that will stress the SOC solution the Atom has. The Intel Atom line is basically inexpensive SOC that runs in about 10 watts... good for battery powered low performance netbook-like systems, but not appropriate for always-on Plugged in HDTV loads where battery consumption is not an issue.

We suggest Reading this FAQ before seeing our upcoming posts
http://code.google.com/tv/web/faq.html



Note:
We have had a few posts here from contributors, they have been removed, and no longer will this blog be supported by any other than the one author owner of this site. For the record, we do not concur with Walt Mossberg's assessment that Google TV is not ready for Prime-Time and a geek-only system. The Software is quite good and will very likely get much better... but some of the baked-in hardware issues will need adressing in future iterations of the system as a whole.