Gadgetory

updated hardware and software hope to bring one of our favorite media products into this year's holiday season it's Joshua freghar from Android authority what's going on everybody and this is a review of the chromecast 2015 edition and chromecast Audio so here we are with a review of the chromecast and chromecast Audio these are the two brand new peripherals if that Google has put out to make media very easy to put on your TV and in the case of chromecast audio to your old speakers now I say old speakers for a reason and we're going to get into that a little bit later replacing the original chromecast is obviously a plug and play situation it does look a little bit different and at first we weren't too sure about the actual design of this device it looked a little bit odd to us and the fact that it actually had to dangle down from that HDMI port was a little bit odd but I do think that there are some benefits to having this particular design as you can see in this shot right here it kind of gets out of the way of any walls that might be right behind your TV in which the original chromecast might actually be pressing up against this time around it actually is a little bit space-saving even if it dangles around and it is a little bit odd in terms of the type of aesthetic that they've picked for this year's chromecast but I do think that the chromecast takes its design from the other peripheral which is Google's focus for this year's lineup and it's chromecast Audio now essentially chromecast Audio takes the same concept of chromecast and makes it a audio-only device this is the kind of device that you put into let's say an old set of speakers which I'll get into again a little bit more later or really any set of speakers that you have and it becomes a full-fledged audio streaming service it will breathe some new life into any of these regular RCA or even optical or just the regular headphone jack type speakers that you might have in your house the chromecast Audio has the same exact design this puck design that doesn't have anything sticking out of it because the cable that you use for the audio can be adapted to other formats but the one that you get is the regular 3.5 millimeter audio jack then of course it does have to be powered by a wall plug or if you happen to have a place that has a USB connectivity you can plug it into that as setting up the chromecast and the chromecast Audio require only one thing your Android or iOS smartphone the majority of smartphones will work with chromecast and that's development that's been great over the last year and a half but on that phone you're going to just have to install the chromecast application and it's within that application that you see in updated design not only is it an aggregation system for all of the different applications you could use with the chromecast it will also point you towards any Content that it thinks you would be interested in but there is a little bit more to it you are able to customize the backdrop on the chromecast this time around with more options that include not only the pictures you could get from websites like 500 pixel but you can also add in Google newsstand capabilities so you'll get a ticker full of pictures and also quick headlines of the top news stories that are happening right now the backdrop is nice to have and if you have your TV on all the time then it is pretty useful to have and it makes it look really nice when you're not actually using your TV with your chromecast performance using the chromecast is supposed to be updated because underneath that kind of odd design that we mentioned earlier there are some updated internals mainly the wireless signal has been updated from the 2.4 gigahertz variety to 5 gigahertz the 5 gigahertz variety does happen to be a little bit more opened up and it should also make it a little bit faster when it comes to buffering the content that you're streaming and in our testing it does seem to do the trick while the presentation at the Nexus event that told us that the content was going to be preloaded in the background as you are selecting it making for almost instantaneous streaming is not really something that we've observed now one thing I will say is recently I signed up for HBO now and HBO now has a pretty substantial portion of the chromecast application right here especially if you have it installed it's going to show you all of the different content that you're going to have and one thing that I will say in terms of the speed of performance is that on HBO now with the original chromecast I did notice that I had to try buffering again multiple times the content tends to get a little bit fuzzy when it goes to lower resolution so we can keep up with the speed but with the new chromecast I've had no problems having HBO now and it has been crystal-clear the whole time now it is true that 1080p resolution video is all you're going to with the chromecast with nothing above it but that's not that big of a deal when a majority of TVs out there are still not even 2k at the moment which brings us to chromecast Audio now this is the type of device that is a little bit more specialized it may not be something that all of you out there are going to be buying but if it fits your needs that this just might be the perfect product for you let's imagine for a second that you might have some old let's say college days speakers that you used in your dorm and you still have them and they perform really well but you don't really have them connected to anything but your laptop or from time to time you might have it connected to a TV that has that type of output chromecast Audio is the kind of device for you that you could really make those speakers actually be viable these days chromecast Audio allows you to have a singular source for streaming music which won't get interrupted by all of the things that your phone would do on the side you can still do things on your actual device while the music is playing on the speaker that chromecast Audio is connected to and the streaming service on chromecast Audio happens to be pretty instantaneous especially if you're using a music streaming service it will fire up right away it was only when I was playing podcasts like on pocket cast that it actually had to buffer especially if I happen to be positioned later in the podcast that I had to download most of it and get to that point first that we not to know not to mention the fact that when you're using Bluetooth your actual notifications might interrupt the audio that you're already streaming to your speaker other than that however audio quality from the chromecast Audio is kind of standard maybe a little bit above average you're paying $35 for an audio peripheral device so you can't really expect it to have the kind of quality that a high quality DAC would have but it is still very viable for anybody out there who has a good set of speakers and just need them to be as smart as their TVs are with chromecast probably the best part about the chromecast is that it is available for pretty much any platform if you have an iOS device you're still good to go Android of course you have it but even if you don't have either of those for whatever reason you can still stream content from your computers using a Chrome browser you can stream not only all of the different streaming services but you can stream a tab from Chrome or the entire desktop and even then for any one of you who have smartphones in the Android space you can also stream your entire screen to the chromecast so there are a lot of possibilities here and as far as the gaming goes we haven't really been able to test out too many games because the library is still pretty bare but we do look forward to seeing how the second screen experience on chromecast might be able to benefit the daily user and when compared to a lot of other peripherals out there like Roku and even Amazon fire TV this is still one of the cheapest but also easiest to use peripherals that are available for this kind of content streaming and also it's pretty easy to use you just have to hit a button in the corner of your application and you're good to go when you press play so keep it tuned to Android 34 even more and I hope you enjoyed this review of the chromecast and chromecast Audio less of a full-on review but more of a way of showing you how the chromecast and chromecast Audio are bringing this type of content to 2015 just wanted to give you guys a quick look at it and my thoughts on it and I do think that at $35 these are definitely the devices that are available this year for an easy entry point into smart television and smart audio so keep it tuned to andr 30 for even more check out more content from my colleagues in android and stay tuned for even more in the android thority application where you can find all of our content including our podcast and then once you're done with all of that 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