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Google TV 2.0 Review, Tweaks, and Screenshots
DeviceGuru writes "Google and its Google TV 2.0 partners made quite a splash at CES this week. As a followup, this detailed blog post at DeviceGuru reviews Google TV 2.0's features, specs, apps, and flexible new user interface, and shows how you can add customized folders and shortcuts to the home screen for accessing hundreds of favorite apps and websites within a couple of mouse clicks."
I have a Logitech Revue with the new Google TV 2.0 and I still don't have access to many of the Streaming Channels I have on my Roku (like Hulu plus). The DLNA Media Player doesn't work, menu navigation is cumbersome, and the search feature doesn't work with Netflix. It just doesn't seem polished for TV. It's like using my Android Phone on my TV and having to navigate with a touchpad keyboard, not something my kids or wife could easily use. I think Google missed the boat with this one!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
I saw this demo'ed at CES and Google made a serious mistake in capability. it turns out you can run only a small set of applications available on the market on Google TV 2.0. The reason for the limited selection is that Google TV 2.0 doesn't support touch/multi-touch. I asked the Google TV person why they weren't supporting multi-touch (at least 2 finger touch) from Bluetooth keyboards/keypads that could provide this capability and hence open up pretty much the full market to Google TV 2.0. he said the capability wasn't in the OS/libraries at all because some OEMs - he specifically mentioned Sony - couldn't support it in their devices. What an amazingly stupid decision. Build the capability into the OS and let the manufacturers with half a brain support it. Users will get most of the market apps and developers will have their lives made simpler as opposed to having yet another Android fragmentation issue to deal with. A truly stupid decision.