Slashdot Mirror
Sony HDTVs To Come With Google TV Interface
adeelarshad82 writes "Even though Google recently announced its own Google TV, seems like their partnership with Sony is going to make it obsolete. Google has partnered up with Sony to launch four HDTVs loaded with the Google TV interface, as well as a Google TV Blu-ray player. The company's Google TV products will be called Sony Internet TV. With the Google TV, Sony aims to provide a clean and easy way to browse the Web, watch TV, and run applications all on your HDTV. Google TV uses the true Chrome Web browser with Flash 10.1. Unfortunately though, at the moment it only has a handful of apps available but Sony said the OS will be updated in early 2011 to include the Android Market app with more options."
No one cares about the current and planned IPTV offerings.
Cable/satellite companies will never let them mature into anything worthwhile.
Sony.
Reasons Slashdot will shit on this:
Flash.
Such a terrible summary its actually weird.
One word: sampenzus.
I can come up easily with reasons not to have it.
Best one? Cost. TVs are already expensive, and to stick a wireless nic in there would tack another $50+ on the price easily, for something I neither want nor need due to my set up far surpassing the need to hook my TV up to my network.
How about stability? Make TVs more complicated, all of a sudden my TV might start crashing, and I won't be able to do anything about it, unless the manufacturer includes an update down the road.
How about signal interference? Make it wifi only, and it's subject to the interference that makes so many areas unsuitable for wifi use. Put in a wired nic, and you're probably upping cost more.
There, three reasons, and two of them affect *everyone* even if they chose not to use the feature.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Because the components will become outdated long before the TV portion does and the only way to update will be to replace the entire thing. Or do you actually think it will be based on an open architecture that will allow replacement of components and still remain in warranty? Sorry, not for me.
All I want to know is if my new Sony TV will come with a free root kit pre-installed at the factory?
TV, Sony or not, is already a rootkit to your mind.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Yes, nothing that has ever been, in generally similar terms, tried once and failed has ever been commercialized successfully later after technology has advanced and details of the approach were changed.
For instance, Apple isn't currently doing a brisk business in selling tablet computers despite the weak success of previous attempts of other companies to do that.
Things have changed a little since 1994. Mainly that we have streaming video. It's an application that actually makes sense for a television.
And how long will it be until Sony decides to start removing features from this TV, because of alleged concerns about piracy, hacking, moping with intent to creep, or whatever other excuse they come up with?
"Sorry, we have removed the web browser's ability to visit any site with a vowel in the URL, because some people were visiting sites about how to use their TV to view unapproved content."
Sorry Sony, you burned me on my PS3, you shall not do so again.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Mouse and/or keyboard for those things that just don't work so well with the fancy remote, external HDD to play back content from (instead of a media center thing that plays back over HDMI and needing an HDMI switch), camera/card reader (presuming it doesn't have a built-in card reader)... yeah, those 4 could end up being used simultaneously just fine.
Your wifi device/router has horrifically slow data rates, is limited to 11-13 channels, operates in a frequency subject to massive interference, is borderline unusable in many populated areas, probably craps out while torrenting, doesn't support modern open firmware (small flash), and can only stream compressed video between ~15Mb-30Mb/s.
The hardware powering this TV's browser/Google TV stack will probably appear ancient in 2-3 years.
Anybody else starting to be a little freaked out about how ubiquitous Google is becoming? I thought phones were cool, but this is starting to scare me. Especially considering the amount of data they collect on us.
Actually, yes, I did have Linux on my PS3. I had it to experiment with the CBE as a signal processing engine, since that's what I do for a living.
And not only am I shut out of PSN, I am shut out of any recent games, any new hardware such as Move, potentially out of new Blu-Ray disks, etc. - which I do because all work and no fun makes Wowbagger a dull boy.
So yes, I DID lose (sorry, loose - I don't want to make you feel uncomfortable) something when Sony took away a feature that they had advertised, that was a part of our sales contract, and that was a part of why I did business with them.
www.eFax.com are spammers