Gadgetory

hey I'm Matthew miskovic from cnet and we're going to take a look at the google nexus q now it may look like a mysterious or but it's actually a streaming media device designed by google manufactured entirely in the united states and it's selling for three hundred dollars the Google Nexus Q doesn't look like any other streaming media device on the market and the hardware is really quite impressive the bottom half of the sphere is all metal which makes it feel solidly built and gives it some serious heft coming in at around two pounds the top half is plastic with the matte black finish and it rotates letting you adjust the volume and if you tap on the tiny light that mutes it there's a ring of colorful LEDs around the center and those lights actually respond to music when it's playing it's actually really fun hardware to play with even if all you can do is adjust the volume around back is the connectivity and there are four recessed ports the optical audio output Ethernet micro HDMI and a micro USB port above those ports are the speaker jacks and that's because the Nexus Q has a built-in 25 watt amplifier that means it can power a set of speakers without the need for a separate AV receiver similar to a sonos am inside there's dual band Wi-Fi Bluetooth NFC and the Nexus Q runs android 4.0 with 16 gigabytes of flash memory one gigabyte of ram and a dual core processor now when you open up the box for the Nexus Q you may be surprised to find that there's no remote and that's because it requires an Android device to control it so if you don't have an android phone or tablet you can't use the Nexus Q at all and while the Nexus Q is micro HDMI port can display videos cover art and visualizations for music there's no way to navigate the device on screen everything is on the screen of your Android device now as cool as the hardware is the Nexus Q can only do three things right now google play music Google Play TV's and movies and you too and although it feels a little like airplay when you're using it it's actually a little different because the Nexus Q only streams content from the cloud so if you have media stored on your phone you can't send it directly to the Nexus Q it also can't handle any other app so there's no netflix hulu plus MLB TV Pandora Spotify you get the idea it can't play media off your own DLNA servers and there's no way to view photos even from google's picasa or Google+ services and all these limitations are particularly hard to swallow when $100 Apple TV and fifty dollar roku LT can do a lot of that and that's the main story with the Nexus Q it's a seriously cool piece of hardware but it really doesn't do that much especially for a $300 device maybe the Nexus Q will get more features in the future either from google or the hacking community but right now it's just not an attractive product I'm Matthew miskovic from cnet and this is the google nexus q