Live coverage from TheVerge

Yesterday, Verizon announced the new Motorola Droid phones, which have a bunch of new features that will presumably appear in every Android device (coverage from TheVerge). For now, I'll stick with today's announcement from Google:

New Nexus 7 tablet: Thinner and lighter. Back-facing camera. 1080p screen. Dual-band WiFi. 4G LTE (single model, works with AT&T, T-Mobile, *and* Verizon). Also, the MicroUSB port supports SlimPort, which seems kinda cool. $229 for the basic model with 16GB of RAM. $349 for the loaded model with 32GB of RAM and the LTE radio.

The LTE specs are actually quite impressive (details at Google's page):
North America:
4G LTE: 700/750/850/1700/1900/2100 MHZ (Bands: 1/2/4/5/13/17)
HSPA+: 850/900/1900/2100/AWS MHz (Bands: 1/2/4/5/8/10)
GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz

Europe:
4G LTE: 800/850/1700/1800/1900/2100/2600 MHz (Bands: 1/2/3/4/5/7/20)
HSPA+: 850/900/1900/2100/AWS MHz (Bands: 1/2/4/5/8/10)
GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz

Android 4.3: Evolutionary changes from Android 4.2, nothing heart-stoppingly awesome. There is clearly a bunch of new support for games, both in Android and in the Google Play store.


Chromecasting: Chrome is now bloated up with cross-platform remote display support. They already have this today with the Android YouTube app (where I can forward a video from my Android phone app to my GoogleTV). I'm guessing this is an admission that GoogleTV penetration has been poor and they're trying to do something cheap and ubiquitous for everybody else. For $35, they may be onto something. There's also a "Google Cast SDK". If somebody could hack up a way to send video from a TiVo to one of these gadgets, that would be a great thing.



Notably absent: any discussion of the "Moto X" that we've all been waiting for. Presumably, it's just a GSM variant of what we've already seen for the Verizon Moto Droid phones.

Notably bothersome: is Google killing GoogleTV in favor of this dongle? The dongle is supported by things like Pandora and Netflix, so perhaps the dongle is secretly a GoogleTV which will install apps, on demand, based on whatever kind of content you push at it. We'll know for sure once that SDK comes out.

SlimPort does look cool, and is an official DisplayPort variant. I'm wondering how this will compete with MHL though. Woo more "standards" and device specific dongles...


Is it actually remote display support though? Everything I'm seeing indicates a device hands off a stream URL with a timecode to the Chromecast, similar to the Google TV Youtube support. Full on device screen mirroring has been handy for when apps don't have the streaming standard support built in.

Also kinda not happy with the name, seems to be diluting Chrome even more. Is it a browser, operating system, portable computer, or stream handoff protocol? Eerily parallel to when Microsoft slapped the .Net name on everything leading to confusion (and thankfully pulled back some before release on certain products).

Here are my thoughts:

Moto X: this wasn't scheduled to be announced today. Everything has been pointing to August 1st. I don't think it's going to be a re-brand of the phones they just announced, either. I think Motorola just wanted to get those out and announced before the Moto X so there was a slight window before the "$500 million ad campaign" killed the stupidly-named "Maxx" phones.

Chromecasting: I have to agree and assume that this is Google's replacement for Google TV. It could work, too. As long as they're able to get content to the phone, I guess they figure why not use that as "the box." Obviously there's some huge drawbacks to this approach (for example: there always has to be a "castable" device in the home if someone wants to watch something), but it could be interesting.

Is there any possibility that Chromecasting could be opened up for cross-platform support? That would be incredible. The only reason my house isn't filled with Airplay devices is that only my wife would be able to use them. I want something that will finally be usable to push audio (and maybe video) to multiple rooms that works on at least Android and iOS. It seems like that's not feasible...

Nexus 7: finally! I think I'm finally going to sell my old tablet and get this one. I'm a little worried about going from 10" to 7", but only when it comes to reading comics. For all other aspects I'd be thrilled to have a smaller device. I've just been waiting for a higher-res screen, since I don't want any more screens from now on without that sort of pixel density.

Android 4.3: yawn. I couldn't care less about "faster user switching." The only feature of note is the support for low-power bluetooth, but that's something they would be fools to NOT include, and I don't have any devices that would use it yet anyway (until I get another Fitbit). 4.3 feels more like 4.2.3.

I'm anxiously awaiting the Moto X announcement. I REALLY want a new phone, and the Moto X sounds like it's going to be the winner. I'm hesitant to get a Motorola phone, but we'll see what they announce...

...which is already possible with Miracast, but that makes this even more confusing...

And no, Chromecasting isn't remote display. It's what you said. Miracast is remote display, though.

Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) was a huge step up over the earlier Android builds. After that, it's been baby steps, but Google have at least been consistently making that progress. For example, The latest Android adds the SELinux kernel below everything else. Supposedly, the fancy security features are turned off, because they don't want to break anything. Yet. But they're there and people can start playing with them.


Supposedly there will be a SDK. I'll be curious to understand how it works. I'm particularly curious how they worked out the security aspect of it, since its Google TV / YouTube predecessor has no security at all. If you're on the same network as a Google TV, your phone magically sees it and can send video to it. There's no pairing, no passwords, nothing.

Unhappy factoids from a Google TV dev (link to G+ page): My Sony Bluray / GTV box is no longer supported, will never be updated to Jelly Bean, and won't support all the new Chromecasting features. Vizio has announced one possible replacement. Sony's own replacement? Cancelled.

I really do like the all-in-one aspect of the Bluray / GTV box: the overlays, the unified remote, the fact that I never have to tell my receiver to switch inputs. I could presumably buy a Chromecasting stick and plug it into my receiver. That seems like a kludge, and it gets rid of the nice all-in-one aspect I like so much.

Grumble.

Okay, last update on this. There's a lot of information on the Google dev page for Chromecast. The most interesting thing to me is how receivers work. Basically, they're just web applications (HTML, JavaScript, etc.) and you get a limited list of codecs. Notably, a receiver app needs to be "whitelisted". This isn't really an open system, despite being built on open standards. It is very simple, though, which is at least a good thing.

One thing is now abundantly clear: given the codec list, there's no way for a TiVo to directly stream its records (in standard MPEG2) to a Chromecast. You'd need to insert a real computer somewhere in the loop to run a transcoder. The whitelisting structure hopefully doesn't impose a huge impediment to building a player for content you've got saved on a server elsewhere in your house. The "receiver" would be a whitelisted web app, but it could then stream from your home server as well as anywhere else.

A Tivo Stream likely output on of the supported codecs, and so could be an option, but then I wouldn't need to buy a Tivo Mini....so I doubt we'll see Tivo creating a receiver app.

Yes, I'm just wishing they'd go faster. A while back I recall that Google said they'd be moving to more of a yearly upgrade cycle for Android. But we're coming up on two years for Android 4.x, which would be a tie for longest time without a full version increase, and the upgrades we're seeing don't seem as significant as the upgrades we saw in the 2.x days. Maybe that's because the OS is maturing and there's less to do, but I still want to give Google a bit of a hard time since I always hassle Apple for minor iterations, and I don't want Google to rest on their laurels.


I completely agree. I have the same GTV as you, and I like all the same things about it. Google really screwed up the GTV, IMO, and Sony didn't help. I always hoped they would release a "Nexus" Google TV box, but I guess that's what the Chromestick is. But I don't want to give up the bluray player (which is actually quite good) or the overlay.


I'm not sure how you would have done this anyway. You would have needed something on the Tivo to push content to the other screen. I don't believe Chromecasting is intended to support control from the receiver end, just from the sender. So you'd have to be at your Tivo, somehow get Chromecasting capability and UI elements into the interface, send it to another TV with a Chromestick, then walk over to the place you're streaming it to. Then you'd have no way to control it. It's easier just to get a Tivo Stream. I guess you could get a Stream and use Miracast to send it to a TV...

Ahh, version numbering and the perception the public has from it I wouldn't recommend you read too much into Android version numbers. The major and minor numbers seem to change meaning and don't really reflect the changes at hand.

Keep in mind that as a user of either platform, you are only exposed to a very small amount of whats changing in each update. Under the hood, both Android and iOS are moving quickly. Both sides are filling in some gaps, touching up APIs with more features, adding good new features, and playing catchup with each other.

Being in a work place with active iOS and Android development really helps to expose all the under the hood work. Google continues to deal with their fragmentation problems and is doing well. Some of that work is likely delaying actual point releases, but the good news is that the work impacts all Android users on 2.2 or above. Some of the Google I/O releases with Google Play Services has benefitted my team already. Had Google chosen to put the new stuff into 4.3 exclusively, we'd be waiting at least two years to take advantage of it.

If TiVo had the hypothetical CPU power to do real-time conversion from MPEG2 (over-the-air recordings) to h264 (supported by Chromecast), then the rest would be easy. You'd have a control app on your phone or something. That tells the Chromecast to load up a (whitelisted) web page which knows the internal address of your TiVo and includes the moral equivalent of <img src="your-tivo/your-video">, except doing it with HTML5 video.

Absent this, you could run a transcoding proxy server on your computer. Such things already exist in other contexts (e.g., PyTiVoX, which transcodes content from your Mac's hard drive and streams it *to* your TiVo). A variant on that, built for the Chromecast, should be technically feasible.

As to the TiVo Stream / TiVo Mini.... words cannot express how annoyed I am at TiVo. My TiVo Premiere has a 100Mb Ethernet on it, and reliably delivers 30Mb when I'm extracting videos. That suggests that they should be able to send at least one HD stream (19Mb) to an external device. Of course, I'm sure it's got inadequate CPU for doing the transcoding, thus the need for the $130 TiVo Stream. Or, for $100 the TiVo Mini would give me the multi-room viewing that I really want, but it only works with the newer TiVo Premier 4 box.

After some deliberation, I think my thinking is to stick with what I've got until something goes belly up. If my TiVo died tomorrow, I'd buy a new one and I'd get the TiVo Mini to go with it. If my GoogleTV died tomorrow, I'd either get another one or see if I could make a Chromecast dongle do the job.

Here's a dream: maybe someday, if/when my circa 2009 receiver dies, there will be a new receiver on the market that has GoogleTV built in. GoogleTV boxes already do some amount of HDMI switching, so why not evolve them into full-blown proper receivers? At that point, they'd have both built-in support for all the GoogleTV goodness, and would be far more seamless with external contraptions like the Chromecast dongle.

I ordered a Chromecast. It's hard to say no when the cost after factoring in the three free months of Netflix is in fast food value meal territory.

I would definitely prefer something that fulfilled the original promises of Google TV (a unified interface for conventional set-top-boxes and online streaming stuff) but there's just too much diversity in STBs, and no incentive for the TV providers to play ball with anyone else.

I'm not sure how I feel about the lack of a built-in user interface. Browsing and searching using an IR remote is never fun, but sometimes you don't want to have to reach for your phone/tablet and fire up / switch to the app just to hit play/pause.

Yeah I know, it's not a good way to measure progress at all. And yeah, I know there's stuff going on behind the scenes, but that's where they are, out of sight. So all I care about are the user-facing improvements that provide tangible benefits to me. In that regard things have certainly slowed recently, IMO. Hell, the #1 feature Google unveiled at IO that had me excited was notification syncing. I can't believe it took them until now to implement that.


That's what my guess would be. I agree, though, it should be something the box can do on its own. I'd guess that the Series 5 will have that built in.


Personally, I'd prefer to have less stuff built into things. I want my TV to be a dumb monitor, I want my receiver to take inputs and route the audio and video properly, and then I want to plug components into the receiver that are easily replaceable in 2-4 years when a better version comes out. This is why I hate all-in-one computers. Sadly this isn't the way things are moving...


Yeah, I can't believe they're throwing that Netflix subscription in. And that includes existing members, doesn't it? In that case, it makes the Chromecast $11! That's just ridiculous.

Yeah, the Netflix is good for anyone, and that was a primary driver of my decision to pull the trigger this early.

Even though they are out of sight when 4.3 hits your device, it still brings tangible and user facing benefits. With better APIs, users get better programs to download from the Play store. Users also enjoy better battery life and performance while using those programs. And new possibilities like a lost and found Bluetooth 4.0 tag are possible.

It's a shame some of this new stuff is tied to 4.3, though it makes sense. The Bluetooth 4.0 part for example requires hardware support too. A newer phone is much more likely to start with 4.3, thus companies like Reveal Labs can move forward with Android support. Most of the rest of the new APIs Google released this year are at least accessible back to Android 2.2, as long as it has the Google Play store.

For me my current Tivo (the two tuner TiVo Premiere with upgraded HDD) is very much the same box as what I got with the Series2 DirecTV unit back in late 2002 (I think it was then) in terms of features that I use.
The Premiere is way under powered in terms of CPU, something that I hope the 5th gen will resolve by moving the Stream encoding capability internally. But I still don't see Tivo supporting Chromecast, they'd much prefer to sell you a Mini for your TV.

Too bad they turned off the Netflix side of the offer so fast. That's longer a driving incentive to get a Chromecast.


Every "home theater" receiver you can buy today does HDMI switching. All the new ones have graphical overlays as well for things like volume controls and they have varying degrees of fancy graphical help with system setup. Once you get beyond the bottom-of-the-barrel, they've all got a variety of Internet streaming features as well (Pandora, Netflix, etc.). It seems that GoogleTV support would be the next logical step for them. The extra compute necessary to support GTV isn't going to appreciably impact the bottom-line cost of receivers above $1000, and probably not even above $500. And I guess that Google is licensing the software for free. Maybe the receiver vendors are scared of patent issues. Maybe they just move at a glacial engineering pace. I don't know.

Crap, I actually didn't look at the product page to see if the free Netflix offer was listed or not, and I guess it wasn't. 1PM Pacific yesterday was the cutoff time, which I missed by two hours.

*sad trombone*

Interesting take on the event, and Google as a whole:
http://stratechery.com/2013/understanding-google/

I still have my Nexus 7. WiFi edition, the initial 8GB unit. Android 4.3 rolls out today (from Wednesday). It's now Saturday, my Nexus 7 says it's running 4.2.2. Checking for updates says it's running the latest.

Anyone else actually see the 4.3 update? Am I missing a step?

I've never received a system update the day it was released. They roll it out, so it takes a while. I'm not sure why. It's not like Google's servers can't handle it. Youtube probably serves up more bandwidth in one second than all the people downloading 4.3 will. My best guess is that they're worried about bugs, so they roll it out in batches to make sure everything is running smoothly. That sounds like what a company of engineers would do

You can download the system image yourself and force the upgrade. Or just wait and it will happen magically.

Exactly. You can download them from here and flash it, but it's better to just wait.

I'll wait. Just seemed odd that Google doesn't push updates across the entire user base, especially with security fixes being part of these updates. Talked with support (found Nexus devices do have phone support), and they indicated it's limited based on serial number.

I downloaded the OTA update file and applied it over USB using adb. Had some troubles with rooted apps for a day or so until the author of SuperSU finally got his app sorted out for the newly included seLinux crap. All working well now, though.

Android, now with more NSA derived goodness

(joke, I'm assuming that the non NSA people who have worked on the seLinux stuff haven't just blindly included the NSA's contributions)