I did an early unboxing and mini-review of Sony’s Google TV for YouTube[1] and now that I’ve had a further week or so with it here is my written review.
I won’t be going over the basic funtions that I mentioned in the video, instead I’ll be giving an overview of my insights over the last week.
The device itself turns on when the TV is turned on so you can easily forget that you are even utilizing an external device, which is great. It comes with 4gigs on onboard space, more than enough for all the applications you’ll ever want or need.
As the technology has only just come upon us the list of TV specific applications are few, however you can easily play a range of Android games through the device and I’ve found three very useful applications: 1) aVia Media Player, 2) Crunchyroll and 3) File Expert.
The aVia Media Player I mostly covered in my video review. It allows you to send any music or video from one android device to another. So if I’m watching a film on my TV and need to go to the kitchen to start preparing dinner, I can easily and quickly have the film pop-up on my Android tablet so I can take it with me and not miss a thing – fantastic!
Crunchyroll is one for specific interests in Anime. It streams the latest Anime episodes, free, from Japan with correct English subtitles. No need to wait for, well, anything….if it’s out in Japan it’s on this app! Even for people who may usually find ‘other means’ of watching anime than waiting for west releases, here you can be asured of the correct English subtitles. You can pay for an account to watch the episodes in HD, but I’ve found the standard free quality to be fine.
Lastly, File Expert is very useful again. File Expert is kind of like aVia Media Player but more allows for your Sony GoogleTV device to act like a full home media centre. Where the aVia Media Player allows media between Android devices to be shared and ‘flung’ from one to the other, the File Expert application works like another other shared computer on your home network. This allows for you to be able to access any shared media files from any computer connected to the same WiFi network. For a free application, this is exactly what I was after; highly recommended.
All in all Sony has created a device that gives control back to their customers and I’m very excited to see a community forming around Sony’s GoogleTV. Sony has been strengthing their ties with their customer base in the last few years, and releasing GoogleTV (with the Android opensource foundation) is a giant leap in that [right] dirrection.
Isaac Rooskov
[1] YouTube unboxing and review:
