Logitech Revue with Google TV Review: A Bridge to the Future

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I’m bullish on Google TV. Bullish. Well, bullish on the concept of Google TV and how it integrates with the current way most people consume television and the way we’ll all consume television in the future. Whether Google TV as a platform ultimately succeeds or fails doesn’t matter as much as the method with which Google has fused TV and the web together. It sets a standard that potential competitors should closely emulate with future products.

Setup

Google TV is not like Apple TV or Boxee or Roku or any of those boxes that connect to your television set. It does some of the same things that those boxes do, but it does a whole lot more.

The standard internet-connected TV box connects to an auxiliary input on your TV and exists separately from however you normally watch TV—TiVo, your cable company’s DVR, over-the-air, etc. Your cable box, for instance, connects to the primary input on your TV and when you want to watch something on your Apple TV, you switch to input two.

Google TV is a primary input device. It sits between your cable box and your television set and acts as a layer over the top of however you normally watch TV. This is crucially important and is the fundamental difference between Google TV and everything else that’s out there. Everything.

diagram

So in my case, Comcast goes into the back of my TiVo box, the HDMI output from my TiVo box goes into the HDMI input on the Logitech Revue, and then the HDMI output on the Logitech Revue goes into the HDMI input on my TV.

Revue_BOX_Input_300_dpi

The end result is a TiVo interface that works just like it normally does and, when I want it, a Google TV interface that I can bring up over the top of TiVo when I want to do something more advanced than TiVo offers.

You could literally hook Google TV up in your house and nobody would notice that it’s there. That makes it a great option for households where some people just want to watch TV and other people want to be able to stream Netflix, watch YouTube videos, or surf the web on the big screen.

Hardware Features

The Logitech Revue kit consists of a box that’s about the size of a standard hardcover book and a wireless keyboard with built-in trackpad.

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The keyboard isn’t as big as it looks in all the press shots, but it’s definitely not ideal to use as your main TV controller. However, due to the way Google TV works, you can use your regular remote for all your TV watching and then grab the keyboard when you want to do Google TV-type stuff.

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Some people may not like having to deal with two “remotes” but if you keep a laptop near the couch to look things up as you’re watching TV, you’ve basically got a serviceable couch computer in Google TV. The keyboard also functions as a big universal remote, using Logitech’s Harmony remote technology. Upon initial setup, I typed in the model number of my TiVo box and the model number of my TV set, and the keyboard recognized both.

The Revue box connects to the internet via an ethernet cable or using the built-in Wi-Fi chip. There’s also digital audio output, two USB ports that can be used to hook up external hard drives or thumb drives, and an IR blaster connection, which you won’t have to use unless the keyboard doesn’t recognize your cable box for some reason.

Everything is powered by an Intel Atom CPU, so you’ve got yourself a little, silent computer for all intents and purposes.

Software Features

Google TV basically does three things; full web browsing, on-demand streaming and downloads from services like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon, and apps from the likes of Twitter, CNBC, Pandora, and more.

While you’re watching TV, you can hit the search button on the keyboard to bring up a semi-transparent search box.

search

From there, you type a full web URL to go to a particular site or you can type in a search term.

Search results are presented according to various functions. If it’s a recognized title of a TV show, you’re able to see if it’s currently on the air somewhere (at which point selecting that result will change to the appropriate channel), where and when it’ll be on the air in the future, where you can find downloadable episodes, or you can do a web search for the show.

ondemand

The built-in web browser is a modified version of Google Chrome that runs in full screen mode. Pages load a tad slowly compared to a standard computer, which is understandable given the Revue’s Atom processor, but sites like YouTube and Vimeo stream HD files effortlessly. Fonts and text are easier to read than I expected, and the keyboard can be used to zoom in and out on particular pages that are too hard to read.

picks

If you hit the Dual View key on the keyboard, whatever you’re watching will shrink down to a picture-in-picture window in the lower-right corner of your screen while you surf the web. Watching Monday Night Football while checking my Fantasy and Pick’em scores during the commercials was truly a life-changing experience. I really wish you could reposition and/or resize the picture-in-picture box—hopefully, that feature’s coming in a future update.

The Home section of Google TV is where a lot of the geekier action takes place. Sections include Bookmarks, Applications, Spotlight, Most Visited, Queue, What’s On, and Amazon Video on Demand.

home

The Bookmarks section houses not only web bookmarks, but TV channels and apps as well. So while you’re watching your favorite channel on TV, you can add it to your bookmarks for later. The next time you click on it, Google TV will automatically tune your cable box to that channel number.

The Applications section houses Twitter, Netflix, CNBC, Pandora, NBA Game Time, the Chrome web browser, network connections to media on your other computers, and more. Despite having all these apps, I really only use the Twitter one with any regularity. Since there’s a built-in web browser, the internet has kind of served as one big app. This section currently features several functions similar to competing TV boxes. And starting next year, programmers will be able to write their own apps for people to add here.

Spotlight includes links to several video podcasts sorted by category, and Queue lets you see any RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to from within the browser. So I loaded up a bunch of video podcast feeds that weren’t available in the Spotlight menu and new episodes show up in my Queue when they’re ready to be watched.

What’s On lets you search currently-airing TV shows by category—sports, entertainment, news, etc.—and Amazon VOD lets you peruse and download TV episodes and movies.

Drawbacks

The starting price, in particular, is a bit on the high side. The cheapest way to get into Google TV is this Logitech Revue kit at $300. I think the hardware in the Logitech Revue kit is worth $300 for sure and it’s not like the price won’t eventually drop and other boxes won’t come out for cheaper. But right now for Google TV as a platform, it’s kind of like a blind date showing up wearing a wedding dress. Less expensive options can’t come along soon enough.

I think $150 would be a killer price point, but even $200 without the keyboard would be a nice option to have—you’ll be able to use a Logitech/Google TV keyboard app with the iPhone and Android phones, though the iPhone app wasn’t available for download while I was testing everything out.

Another potential problem arises when you have multiple Google TV fans living under the same roof. The box asks for the credentials from one Google account upon setup, but it’d be nice to have multiple, switchable user accounts so each person could have their own favorites and apps. Something tells me that feature is probably coming sooner or later, though.

The biggest issue lies with the content providers. For example, even though the built-in web browser looks and feels just like a computer web browser, guess what happens when you go to Hulu.com? You’re greeted with this:

hulu

That’s certifiably insane considering you have a computer hooked up to your TV, except the computer says “Google TV” on it. It goes to show how much power these content companies have, though, and how crazy they start acting as people get closer and closer to connecting computers to their TVs.

The Big Picture

Google TV’s real potential competition comes from the likes of TiVo and Comcast since those companies’ boxes are input one devices. TiVo’s done an okay job of rounding out its internet-based video offerings, but it doesn’t have the web browser. Comcast has on-demand, but no networking features whatsoever. Verizon’s come the closest with its FiOS widgets and networking capabilities. Any of these companies could (and should) do what Google’s done, even if the end results are somewhat clunkier than Google TV at first.

I think the $300 price tag is going to scare a lot of consumers away unless they really get the idea of what’s being done here. Google would be wise to send a representative to every single Best Buy store in the country just to demonstrate how everything works. I don’t think Google’s marketed Google TV strongly enough and I don’t think it’s done enough to stress how the product is different from the sub-$100 streaming media boxes like Apple TV.

As a platform, everything works together relatively cohesively. The fusion of TV and the web is a weird thing to conceptualize, but Google’s done an admirable job of tying it all together and presenting it in an interface that isn’t too overwhelming. That being said, it’s still a geeky product. For a Google product, though, it’s already impressively polished. This isn’t something the company launched in beta with plans on updating it along the way. Updates will happen, sure, but it’s already a powerful technological showcase.

I showed Google TV to one of my normal, non-techie friends yesterday and he got exponentially more excited as I dug deeper into what can be done with it. He eventually stopped me and said, “This is all I want for Christmas.”

His thought was that he could cut the tie with Comcast this way, which is true to a certain extent. The real beauty of Google TV, though, is that you don’t have to cut the tie with your cable provider until you’re ready—or ever. It enhances how you currently watch TV while offering the same a la carte programming as competing TV boxes. And if there’s someone in your house that doesn’t want to have to re-learn a whole new TV system, they can keep watching TV as they normally do without Google TV interfering.

In that sense, it’s a bridge into the future of TV. It doesn’t assume that people want to get rid of their cable subscriptions all at once but if and when they do, it’ll act as a fine video-on-demand box with a full internet browser.

The world won’t end if you wait until less expensive devices hit the market. But if you happen to get a chance to try Google TV out in person and you really get into all it can do, it’s going to be hard to resist the purchase.

More on Techland:

Sony Unveils Internet Connected Google TV Products

Two Minute Video: The One Killer Feature of Google TV

More Google TV Details: Content Partnerships, Apps, and More

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