I wrote in my original review of the Logitech Revue that the Multitasking menu was cool, but I couldn't remember how I had stumbled on it. Well, I found it. This functionality could not have been done justice in any other medium, so I present for you a quick video on finding the GoogleTV Multitasking/app-switching menu and how it works:
in GoogleTV | 1 Response Posted 2010-12-20 08:00
Disclosure: As an attendee at MAX 2010, my Logitech Revue was provided gratis. However, my opinions -- both good and bad -- are uninfluenced by this fact, as much as is humanly possible.
Installing the Logitech Revue hardware couldn't have been simpler. I did surprise even myself by reading the instructions first -- mostly out of curiosity for how well designed they were (spoiler alert: not bad) -- but it is pretty easy to guess. Connect up the power and HDMI inputs (from your cable or dvr box), and connect the HDMI output to your TV. Including time to unbox and bask in its beauty, I think I had it powered up in less than 5 minutes.
The revue doesn't support component output, so this device also served as the final straw for my existing component-input usage. I'm switched over to HDMI for nearly everything now, and happier for it. My TV doesn't handle 1080p, only 1080i, and when I briefly enabled it there was a noticeable flicker, not unlike the "good" old days of CRT monitors at 60Hz. So for the time being I'm stuck watching at a lowly 720p.
The initial configuration that needs to be done is mostly well designed and intuitive. As others have noted, you have to sign in with a google account, which presents a conundrum for households with more than one übernerd -- whose google account do you use? I don't think my wife knows that she has a "google account" ("is that different from my gmail account?") so my choice was made for me: use my own account.
The only part that tripped me up was integration with my DVR. I have Dish Network service and one of the supported DVR hardware units, so when the step came up to integrate the Revue with my DVR I happily complied. I knew there would be a charge from Dish for anything useful (searching channels and shows, watching recordings, scheduling recordings, etc) but I figured that some basic level of integration would be supported for free, so I wanted to see what I could do. For the $0 I was willing to add to my monthly bill, what I could do amounts to precisely nothing.
I'm not exactly sure why Dish feel it's necessary to charge a $4 per month fee for the privilege of letting a better designed bundle of hardware and software control their haphazard clunky piece of junk. I wouldn't be getting any additional service that I'm not already, so it's not as if there is extra cost to them that needs to be covered. The only possibly-reasonable answer is to recover the costs of developing the integration features; but if that's the case then I would counter that the pricing model is unjustified and exorbitant. At most I would be willing to pay a one-time fee of $30 or $40 for the privilege of integration, and since I plan on having my Revue for much more than a year, the long-tail cost is more than I'm willing to pay.
In my personal opinion, the $4 monthly fee that Dish charges is what it is because the market will bear it; and the market, as is so often the case, is stupid. If more people spent less money on TV and more on their mortgages and car payments (and didn't take on debt they couldn't afford) then we would be in a much better situation right now. Ah well, that's the way the cookie crumbles. If I don't like it, I'm free to take my patronage elsewhere, eh?
Anyway, back to the setup process. When I realized that I wouldn't be using the integration with my DVR, I was taken aback in a moment of stupor. Will I at least be able to let the TV pass through? Of course, but the UI for the setup dialog did not make this clear: (paraphrasing) "Setup your DVR integration or you won't be able to control your TV!" This may be intentional, to trick the weak minded into paying for service they don't want; or perhaps just poor design. I ended up going back through the tv step two or three times to make sure I understood how it would work and that I was getting what I wanted.
Everything else about initial setup was pretty straight forward. I chose wired networking instead of wireless, because (1) I already have cable run and a switch in my entertainment center for the 360 and other purposes, and (2) I knew going into this that the majority of my usage would be streaming audio and video over my home network to the TV, and I didn't want any wireless signal strength, interference, or latency problems. It picked up an IP via DHCP and I was online in minutes.
I've had it for about 7 days now, and I believe my suspicions were right. If I had to guestimate a pie chart of my usage so far it would look something like this:
The web browsing has been primarily to have my fantasy football team stats up on screen while watching football games. Using Picture in Picture for this is awesome. I do wish that I could select which corner to display the tv feed in, but just having the ability at all is something to be happy about. (If you're wondering, I'm in the playoffs in two of my three leagues and kicking some serious butt.)
As I alluded to with the fantasy football comments above, multitasking is fun and useful, as is PiP. I like that the home screen is always just a single click away. And the video and audio streaming quality -- at least as far as I've seen so far -- has only been limited by the source content. There are only a handful of supported containers and codecs, mostly around H.264 or Xvid video with AAC audio or WMV, but thankfully my media collection seems to be made up entirely of this type of content.
The built in DLNA streaming support, insofar as it seems to automatically pick up on my Windows 7 shared folders, is garbage. Don't waste your time with it. This may be a Windows 7 problem, not a Revue problem, but the key takeaway is to just use something else. I've spent days trying to get it to recognize that I've added new video and audio content to my collection since originally connecting the Revue, to no avail. Eventually I gave up on the auto-detected avenue and decided to give TVersity a try. So far it has been terrific: I haven't had a single problem, and the way you browse your library from the Revue seems much more natural, or at least more in tune with what I would expect.
I would like the ability to add apps to the left-most navigation bar on the home screen. Since media streaming is such a core part of how I use the device, having the app buried in the Applications menu or under Bookmarks is annoying. 70-90% of the time I want Logitech Media Player ("LMP"), so it makes sense to me that I would want it as the top option on the main menu. [Update: I've since figured out how to modify the left navigation of the home screen and I've hidden a few things, reordered a few, and added Pandora. I was able to add Pandora to the main menu but LMP is not an option, which I find incredibly annoying. Hopefully a future update will address this.]
As a last.fm user, I would like to be able to at least scrobble what I'm listening to on my TV -- whether that be what I'm streaming from my iTunes library with LMP or using the Pandora app -- if not also browse content from last.fm itself.
Being a part of the smartphone generation, when I browse the web away from my laptop I often need to zoom. Perhaps I'm just not using it right, but the zooming functionality in Chrome on Google TV feels clunky and forced. I would love to see a pinch gesture supported on the touchpad on the remote, but short of that, something has to be done to make it a more core part of how you browse.
Getting a list of running apps or open content still has some kinks to work out. There was one time that I stumbled on some sort of GUI for switching between running applications, but I can't remember how I got to it, so something's wrong there. That's a core part of multitasking. But that one time I did find it, it worked well. ;)
I'm not a news, basketball, or youtube junkie, so none of these apps (cnbc, nba, youtube) interest me at all. I also don't check my email on it (too public), or do much generic web surfing. Generally I have an iPad or my laptop nearby for that.
I don't do much "searching" of my TV, because I don't pay the extra cost for the integration features. I will sometimes search for the video or audio that I want to stream, but more often than not I have something very specific in mind and with the size of my media library it is easier to just browse to the exact album or tv show season/episode I'm interested in, rather than paging through tons of search results. I can see how it would be useful --awesome, even-- if you paid for the integration. No more remembering what the channel number is for FX, or Spike, or G4; just search for it. No more remembering which network a tv show is on; just search for it. If only it weren't behind the wall of greed.
That's easy: An app store. I would have thought that by now it would have launched. There are multiple TVs with gTV software available in stores, and the Revue covers everything else. Heck, they just gave away a couple thousand Revues (to lucky people like myself), so there is a wide audience. I think it's time to see what great ideas 3rd party developers can bring to the moderately big screen.
The jury is still out on this one. It will be tough to decide until the App Store emerges in some form and some cool apps start coming out. For now, it's mostly relegated to acting as an overpriced Roku or Boxee box, or an underpriced mac mini, which is what I was considering getting as an HTPC before the Roku/Boxee/gTV craze started.
in GoogleTV | Reviews | 8 Responses Posted 2010-12-09 07:48
