Google TV

Lucky me. I entered a drawing back when the Google TV was announced and found out last week that I’d won! This afternoon, a shiny new Logitech Revue (with Google TV) arrived on my doorstep. After the ChromeOS netbook that showed up last week, I’m suddenly on Google’s good side.

Impressions so far on the Revue:

• Unboxing, my initial thought was “chincy.” The keyboard is neat, but looks a bit like a kid’s toy to me. However, it’s pretty nice to type on, sturdy in use, and I’m really growing to like it.
• I don’t have home TV service, at all. No cable, no OTA HDTV. Everything I’m watching is off Netflix, so no real review of how it handles your cable box.
• Setup was pretty easy, if a bit … complicated. With my Apple TV, I plugged it in, gave it a wireless password and I was done. With this I plugged it in, gave it a wireless password, told it the model number of my TV, which I had to pull off the wall to find (ugh), waited for it to install an update, rebooted twice, went through a crazy screen tuning exercise, and then got a nice intro movie telling me how awesome the device is.
• Vs either my Apple TV or my XBOX 360, having a keyboard is super freaking awesome. I’m typing a blog post on my TV. Yes I could do this by hooking up a laptop to my TV via HDMI. It’s still awesome.
• The Netflix app is pretty sweet. Much better display than the 360 app, if less pretty. Having a keyboard for search is phenomenal.
• The thing has a fan, which roars to life during bootup. So far, the fan hasn’t come on in use, but if it does, yikes. So far, so good.

More later as I play with this thing some more. So far, it’s pretty cool. The web browser alone makes it pretty awesome.