Seems like only yesterday we reviewed the Google TV with Chromecast. In fact, it was December 2020. Much time has passed and at some point a firmware update fixed the restarting issues. But this latest update… it has caused problems. Although Google’s latest update claims to fix storage issues, we have found the opposite.
The issue with the device is storage. It consistently does not have enough storage and provides no warning when storage is full. Since the latest update it’s possible to clear the cache from all apps simultaneously with a single command. That’s a nice feature, but things tend to get so bad that the system will report ZERO bytes available without informing the user. There is no warning prompt about the storage. In this state, streaming content might still play without frame drops, but it may take 5 seconds to initiate the cast session (for something like YouTube). We never saw this sort of delay from a conventional Chromecast.
Although we have found it relatively simple to factory restore the device, we find these storage issues inexcusible and we can no longer recommend the Google TV with Chromecast. Sorry, Google, you just lost our TV.
Meanwhile, the new $35 Fire TV Stick 4K Max has picked up the slack and delivered a better solution, for now, especially now that it has dedicated buttons for Fire TV Recast, a product and UI we are still evaluating.
While we are quite sad about our soured Google TV, we find dedicated pause, fast forward, and rewind buttons are more important than many were willing to acknowledge.
It’s time to accept that fact that Google TV was filling a gaping hole in the home theater space, a hole formerly clogged with the over-priced Apple TVs and its terrible remote. No product is perfect and a product is sometimes only as good as its last bad software update. Thankfully, these devices have become incredibly inexpensive.
For now, we are quite amused by the capabilities of the Recast, especially during bad weather and power outage. Thanks to our winter failover strategy, we can watch local broadcasts from iPad even hours into power outage without a noisy generator. That could give us plenty of time to watch talking heads scapegoat each other for not fixing the power grid.