Review: Google TV 3.1

Every day an enormous number of people perform the exact same act, right around the same time. They sit down on their favorite comfortable thing in the living room and watch something on television. The details beyond this point are varied, but a significant subset of those people also have a smartphone, laptop, or tablet within arms reach. Maybe you need something to do during the commercials, or maybe you are joining the masses in discussing the show you are watching in real time on your social network of choice. If you aren’t watching the latest hit TV show, you might be sitting with a loved one watching a movie when all of a sudden you remembered where you had seen that actor before, but of course your significant other disagrees. The resulting argument inevitably ends in a battle for who can get to IMDB faster to seek the truth of the matter, and by now neither of you are actually watching the movie.

Several companies have tried to make their televisions or television accessories more appealing by adding a couple of web favorites like Youtube or Netflix to their devices. Google decided to try and take things a few steps further by adding the web and the ability to communicate with the other devices in your home with Google TV.

The theory brought about by what was hoped to be a revolutionary advancement in the TV experience was to put the web on the biggest screen in the house, and add some Android flair while they were at it. The hardware fell flat on its face due to the minimum $300 price tag. To make matters worse, many websites that offered digital content to computers intentionally blocked Google TV devices from accessing the content because the license needed to put that content on the TV was very different from the one needed to put it on a computer screen. Since the creators of this content could not control how the content was displayed, the content was blocked. So, Google went back to the drawing board with a new UI, tools that would make it easy for content creators to push their content to the all new Google TV.

Hardware

For this review, I spent several weeks with a 32-inch Sony GT1 running the latest version of Google TV. Previous to this I owned, and still use daily, a Logitech Revue with the older version of Google TV on it. Using a TV with Google TV baked in means I have Google TV on the entire device. With my Revue, I have Google TV on whatever I am passing it through to the television. For me, this means my TiVO HD. On the Sony Google TV, I can access everything I would access on my Revue when I am playing Xbox, watching a Blu-Ray, or even my VCR if I really wanted to.

While it is impractical to suggest everyone go buy a new TV just for this functionality, if you are in the market for a television the Sony experience with built-in Google TV is significantly better, and I hope more manufacturers pick this up soon. You could technically accomplish the same goal with the Logitech Revue but that will at least another $100 to your setup and adds a layer of complication to the experience. You can still get a great experience from a set top box-style device, but the experience from a baked in device is, in my opinion, much better.

New User Interface

The first version of Google TV was pretty cool, but the user interface was often clumsy and difficult to navigate. The entire user interface has been revised to fall in line more closely with the Fragments design technique Google deployed with Android 3.0, Honeycomb. Now, as your activity continues on the screen, an unobtrusive pop up across the bottom is the extent of your main menu. You can choose what apps go along this bar, and your notifications are here for quick access. You can choose for notifications to pop up at you while using the television, or you can have the notifications gather here silently.

This is a significant improvement on the GTV 3.1′s previous version of this menu, as it does very little to take away from whatever you are doing on the screen at that time. Complete with the native picture in picture that has been around since the first iteration of Google TV, and you can navigate most of Google TV without losing your screen.

Notifications and Recent apps can be accessed either from the notification icon, or in typical Android style by pressing and holding the Home button on the keyboard. Your network connection is also show in the top right, though there’s no way to gain additional information as that icon is unreachable via navigation. If a third tab for Settings were to exist in the network spot, I think this screen would be perfect for quickly accessing most things inside Google TV that you wold navigate to for information.

Apps!

Everyone with a smartphone nowadays knows that apps make the world go round when it comes to how useful your device is. Google TV originally hoped a powerful browser would be all the app it would need, but as content began to disappear it became clear that content providers wanted a way to feel secure about how the information was displayed.  So, Google brought the Android Market to Google TV and even involved developers in a “fishtank program” for several months that allowed for apps to be ready for the launch of the update.

The Android Market for Google TV 3.1 is limited to apps that have been designed to function with these devices, since these operate differently than an app you would use on your phone. With a physical keyboard and a trackpad instead of a touchscreen, the apps need to be compatible or they would both look and work poorly. So, you won’t be seeing the full 200,000+ app selection , but there is no shortage of choices. Already, content creators are putting their content in app form on Google TV so you can experience even more unique content. My personal favorite so far is Classy Fireplace. It does pretty much exactly what the title suggests.

Unfortunately, not everyone is on board the Google TV train yet with their apps. Despite being in the Android Market, the Hulu Plus app is not available for Google TV, and this is the message you get just for traveling to their website, where previously you were at least able to browse and edit your queue before you were flagged and told no. Hulu has been pretty busy getting Hulu Plus on everything from your phone and tablet to the new Kindle Fire, so maybe Google TV isn’t far away. Either way, it seems the normal free Hulu service will never be available on Google TV, you will need the subscription.

As cool as having the Android Market is, and being able to expand the possibilities of my Google TV, I am a little confused at some functionality that the GTV Market is missing. For quite some time now, Android users have had the luxury of being able to update all apps on their devices that didn’t change your permissions with a simple “Update All” button. This button does not exist in Google TV, you have to update each application individually. For a device that is now based in Honeycomb, that’s a pretty bizarre thing to have go missing. I hope Google restores this functionality soon.

Network-attached media

Something of an unsung improvement to this OS is a dramatically improved list of audio and video codecs that can not be played either from the device, or streamed from a networked computer or media server. The Media Player app will automatically detect any devices on the network that are currently sharing and stream any content to the television. Pictures, music, and most video formats are not only supported but detected immediately.

Navigation is still kind of clumsy, especially if you have a lot of files to browse though. If you have files organized in nice, neat folders, Google TV won’t scan more than one folder deep so the files won’t show. Additionally, you can’t really navigate through folders, it is very what you see is what you get in that aspect. If you are connecting to a proper media server, you have some much better navigation options, but the basic share from a Windows PC is limited. This is still a pretty substantial update over the original release, and coupled with real media server apps your Google TV becomes a home theater powerhouse.

Final Thoughts

Google TV has certainly come a long way from when I first opened my Logitech Revue back in January. While I am really happy to see many of these updates, the platform still needs more content in the Market to make it worth it to the average user. Content is now something that can be easily added, and as long as it doesn’t take very long I have every confidence that users will be very happy with the 3.1 update.

Unfortunately, it’s really not the existing customers Google needs to focus on right now. Google TV needs a street team with the energy and intensity that the Google Wallet and Google+ products have had recently. Users need to be made aware that this is something that they actually want. The original appeal group to this product was, mistakenly, the cable cutters. While Google TV is actually better prepared now than it was to enable users to stop paying for cable, the real power behind this platform comes when you connect a cord to it. Right now, I have my FIOS cable card powering my TiVO and I haven’t seen my remote in weeks. I can sit with my phone and control my entire home theater setup.

Logitech and Google said that the 3.1 update would be coming “soon” for the Revue, but that was before that memo got passed around that Logitech was planning to ditch the Google TV project and move on, so at the moment nobody really knows what is going on with that update, but hopefully we will see it soon. If you have, or plan to get, a Sony Blu-Ray player or TV that has Google TV onboard, you should already have the latest and greatest from Google.