The other piece of tech I got to play with this weekend was something I picked up for the family living room…The Sony NSZ-GT1 bluray player and GoogleTV combo. On the surface, like the Kindle Fire, it is very much for the consumer crowd. Once you get a few more apps on it though the thing really open up. The only real limiting factors on what Android apps you can run are the slightly different flavor of the OS GoogleTv uses and the Intel chip inside.
Setup..a breeze. The controller is something the boys and I took to immediately. The stock apps are ok but given about an hour hunting about for others to load in and we were really cooking with a full head of steam. All the media (music, movies, videos, photos) around the house net was available to stream or move over to the device. One of the stock apps tied us into our Netflix and Amazon Prime accounts to include all those videos. Google Music was there ready to offer me all the music I had in its cloud. Bingo bango…oh and it plays Bluray discs, so there is that added bonus for the house.
Downsides…Hulu+ and a few other sites have said "No Soup For You GoogleTV" and so I am saying "No Money For You". Our Hulu+ account is going off in a month or two.
Other downsides…some of the games the kids like to play on their refurbed Droid 1s wont work on the device…so no Angry Birds until there is a port.
Upsides, the built in Chrome Browser works on every damn web site the kids and adults use (except for places like Hulu+ that are blocking the goodies). PBS kids, Armor Games, Youtube (or YogsTube as the kids call it) etc etc…all work.
Downsides…No camera is found to work with it yet so no Google Hangouts or Skype.
Bottom line, we got a damn good price on it and it has worked a charm in making all our media around the housenet and in the cloud just work on the big screen in the living room. Not only that most everyone in the house was able to navigate to what they wanted, be it a movie, song , website or app, with very little difficulty. We had been using WiiMC on our Homebrewed Wii, this though is far better.
