While the majority of this review isn’t going to go Google’s way, you do at least have to admire the brand for its persistence.
The latest Android-based smart TV platform – cunningly called Android TV – is by my reckoning Google’s third stab at becoming a force to be reckoned with in the smart TV world. Actually its fourth if you also include the early and little-seen Android 4.2 Jelly Bean effort introduced on a few high-end Philips TVs in a handful of European territories last year.
Let’s not forget, either, the large number of external third-party Android TV boxes out there for people not bothered about having an integrated solution.
Unfortunately for Google, though, while it’s scored a hit with its relatively simple Chromecast streaming dongle, none of its previous attempts to do a dedicated, integrated TV operating system - to do on TVs what it does so effectively on phones, in other words – have met with much success. Its debut Google TV platform, in particular, is widely regarded as a fairly abject failure.
The great thing about failures and mistakes, though, is that you can learn from them. So my hopes were honestly high for the new Lollipop 5.0 version of Android TV when I first started using it on one of Sony’s new TVs (the recently tested 75X9405C).
Not the best of starts
Sadly Android TV feels wrong pretty much as soon as you clap eyes on it. For while most TV brands are now moving their smart TV platforms to minimal designs that sit on top of the TV pictures you’re watching, calling up Android TV on the Sony TV sees the Android TV home menu taking over the whole screen.
In a world where we all take multi-tasking for granted, Android TV’s refusal to let us keep watching TV while we browse its menus immediately makes it feel over-bearing and dated when compared with the much slicker approach of more understated smart TV platforms like LG’s webOS and Samsung’s new Tizen platform.
It also flies in the face of modern smart TV wisdom with the amount of content options it throws in your face. The home screen is arranged as a series of seven horizontal shelves, with any four shown on screen at once. And each of these shelves is packed with icons that scroll off almost endlessly to the right providing links to apps, content sources, and games.
Clearly Android TV wants to make it blindingly obvious from the get go that it’s not going to suffer the sort of content shortages so many other smart TV services have suffered over the years. And to some extent you can’t blame it for wanting to make a song and dance about how many apps it carries; content richness is, after all, arguably the most compelling reason for a TV manufacturer like Sony to adopt the Android TV platform. Android is, after all, already supported by a huge app-development community, so the chances are that it will ‘benefit’ from far more third-party app support than any proprietary Sony smart TV platform ever could.
Less can be more
The problem, as the rest of the TV world has come to realise, is that while vast amounts of content initially appears to be a strength, it’s actually a weakness. Most people – there are potentially exceptions, which I’ll talk about later – do not want their TV’s operating system to be cluttered up by unwieldy hordes of apps. Partly because TVs are, by their nature, relatively passive and shared devices compared with smartphones and tablets, and partly because no TV interface to date has got close to being as capable of searching and browsing huge amounts of content as a smartphone or tablet.
It’s also a simple fact that some – I’d argue, most – of the apps you’ll find on a platform as open as Android TV will be of, to put it politely, niche interest. Or to be less polite, many will either be pointless, rubbish or both. So the last thing a TV user (as opposed to a smartphone or tablet) needs is to have to wade through piles of garbage in search of the occasional gem.
To be fair to Google, it isn’t just letting every app available for its Android smart TV and tablet platform turn up on your telly. It’s introduced a filtering system to weed out apps that aren’t appropriate for a TV environment – games that depend on touch screen controls, for instance. But there doesn’t appear to be any real attempt to filter out apps based on how likely they are to be of much use to a typical TV viewer.
This generally rather vague, unfocussed approach is also unfortunately all too visible on the top ‘shelf’ of the Android TV home page. This shelf purports to carry Recommended content – links to material Android TV thinks you will be interested in based on what turns out to be a rather limited assessment of your app usage habits. Recommended content can include everything from links to YouTube videos and news videos (if you have a compatible news feed app in your downloaded app list) to tutorial videos and direct links to films.
The limitation game
While the Recommendations shelf might sound like a good idea in principle, the reality is a big let down. The engine used to populate the shelf doesn’t work with every app in your app collection; doesn’t include any analysis of the TV shows you watch; and doesn’t support any provision for personalisation, meaning there’s no way for different members of your household to establish their own individual Recommendation shelves tailored just to their needs.
0 comments: