It's unfortunate that the demo they performed went so badly. If I'm going to view internet on my TV, it has to be easier than plugging in my laptop. After watching them fiddle around with their devices so awkwardly, I doubt it will be any easier. Part of me was wishing that I could watch Steve Jobs debut a new web-enabled Television that just freaking works.
Yeah, but in all reality they had 4,000 people trying to use bluetooth (which only has 79 channels). Perhaps it was dumb of them to not use a WIRED keyboard. I didn't see many problems besides the keyboard issue.
Seems like it would be pretty straightforward. Just update the AppleTV OS with an App Store and BlueTooth+expanded IR capabilities, and let the 3rd party developers bring the internet stuff and advanced input options to it. It seems that Google TV doesn't leverage my local media, so my iTunes/media library is still isolated from my living room, unless I'm missing something and it turns out to be an Android OS variant (supports native 3rd party app development) and developers can implement that sort of functionality with it.
according to matt cutts' live "buzz". It is an android OS variant!
"Software: Built on Android 2.1 + Google Chrome + a Flash 10.1 plugin. Aha: Android apps will work on Google TV. The mobile market will work on Google TV. Demo of Google TV running Pandora with no changes by Pandora. Brittany Bohnet from the Google TV team is up. From a web browser, you can select an app, and the app gets sent straight to the Google TV. Two application frameworks: web apps, and Android apps. A Google TV-specific SDK will come out down the road. Ambarish Kenghe is up to talk about Google TV. You can optimize for the size of the screen. From a web site, I think he said you'll be able to switch channels and record shows."
They asked everyone to please turn off our phones because the wifi was interfering. I'm pretty sure they said "wifi" and not "bluetooth." I thought that was strange because you'd expect a keyboard/remote to be bluetooth.
Theory as to what went wrong: they pushed out an update to the GoogleIO conference Android app earlier this morning. I'd already upgraded before the keynote started; some of the people I was there with got it & some didn't. The app now uses wifi for inside geolocation. I wonder if a lot of wifi devices coming on swamped the system a bit?
Don't Bluetooth and 802.11b/g wifi both operate on the same 2.4Ghz spectrum? I'm pretty sure if you do a google (or duckduckgo) search on "bluetooth wifi interference" you'll find a lot of hits.
It's a beta presentation, relax. You can find on youtube many failures that happened on Steve Jobs presentations too. I'm sure the final version will work just fine, just like any google product.
Glitches happen to anyone in a presentation, Steve Jobs is no exception. The difference, however is Apple rarely demos "betas", "early release" or "pre-alpha" stuff like Google seems to show off exclusively (OS betas naturally being the exception. Everybody shows off OS betas — it would be foolish not to).
Put another way: What was the last product Google unveiled that wasn't a beta in some capacity?
