Sony’s line of Bravia-branded TVs for this year blew everyone out of the water by announcing at CES that its new 4K screens will be running on Android TV.
On the Android TV front, you get that familiar experience of your smartphone or tablet right on the big screen. In addition to Google’s digital content, from apps to movies, these TV’s are Google Cast Ready, ready to receive any content you can throw at it from your mobile device. The built-in microphone on the new Remote lets you use Google’s Voice Control to search and control the TV from the comfort of your couch. And speaking of remotes, the new touch-pad Remote offers Sony’s convenient One-Flick operation that removes the tediousness of maniacally pushing buttons just to get to the content or app that you want.
But We all know that when good and better tech devices come out it means not so good news for those who have the latest Google TVs and devices as Google has announced to developers the bad news “most Google TV devices won’t support the new platform,” which means that Google TV you bought on black Friday won’t be supported. Don’t worry just yet although a small subset of devices will be upgraded to the new Android 5.0 software. There’s no word on exactly which ones are covered, but the team at Google will be focusing their efforts on Android TV and the Cast ecosystem. Old Google TV boxes will still work, but you can pretty much cancel any hope of further updates or continued support from future apps.
Google has lined up a decent list of partners who will support it, including Sony, Sharp, and Qualcomm. They also partnered up with Netflix , Hulu and other major streaming networks to support the device which is pretty much a win win for any Google user. Now to throw away my smart TV which…isn’t so smart compared to this monster.