Gadgetory

what's up guys Lew here and I just picked up the brand new chromecast which was announced yesterday and there was some next-day shipping available on Amazon but they sold out pretty quickly I don't know if there are any remaining right now but I will link it down in the description so you can check the pricing and availability at the time that you're watching this this thing is 35 bucks and it claims to do some pretty impressive things for that price I'm excited to check it out see how it operates see how it works as you can see on the back here promises to give you you know your usual smartphone functionality on your television you've got Chrome capabilities YouTube capabilities Netflix and anything from the Google Play Store and it does all of that in an incredibly tiny little device I wanted to do a really quick unboxing because it is such a brand new device this is the thing this is all you need this little guy right here it looks about the size of a USB key and it has an HDMI on one side a micro USB on the other side and then what looks like a little button and then what looks like a little but yeah and then a little button as well probably the power button not 100% sure but that's the device that does all the magic you will need USB power for it so I assume that's the other part that's inside of here plug it in attach USB power switch the input set it up and you are good to go yeah so here's the other items in the box you have a USB cable a tiny little USB power brick right here and then lastly you have an HDMI extender so I guess if your HDMI port is not all that accessible or you can't fit the dongle in there you have a an option to extend it using this HDMI extender and then there's a tiny little manual that I almost missed in there a tiny little manual for it but I don't think I'm gonna read that I don't think I need to because judging from the getting started guide on the inside here it looks pretty damn simple so I'm gonna go ahead connect it to this flat panel over here and see what it can do I decided to hook it up to this smaller TV actually because I thought it would be easier to demonstrate the setup process since the HDMI port is kind of hidden on this one I did need to use the extender and I do want to mention it gets on there real tight so it's probably not gonna come off by accident if you do need use the extension and then on the other end you have a little LED light that will tell you if the device has power you use the little USB to get that baby going now setup is a little bit finicky you can only do so right now with a few different devices or actually a number of different devices you can use Mac OS 10 point 7 and beyond I believe as well as Windows PC and then Android mobile devices in my case I'm using a laptop here and you have to navigate yourself to google.com slash chromecast slash setup and after that it'll pretty much get going on its own it's pretty simple you just click Next Next hook into your wireless network put in your password and then the chromecast will be available to you there is an extension that you install into your browser into Chrome which will then give you the ability to broadcast whatever it is that you're seeing in Chrome whether that means a tab or YouTube video you can still see the authentication process here it asks you to match up the two codes on each of your two devices and of course mine were matching so that allowed me to move on to the next step but after that you're pretty much ready to cast as it says on the screen it will remain in that state until you push something over to it so you have a couple of different options if you're on YouTube for example right in the YouTube video on the bottom portion there is a capture a cast button sorry and you can click that button and then just cast the video portion of your page or if you want to get fancy you can cast the entire Chrome tab so if you're on a site like Amazon for example I just did this for an example of course you can see me scrolling through here there's a tiny bit of lag but actually pretty damn useful and I can see myself using this for a number of different applications so you can either cast a tab and see your entire web browser or you can cast an independent video but everything is pretty seamless and much quicker than I expected it to be especially for a $35 device this thing is actually pretty impressive the story is exactly the same on your mobile device in this case on my Nexus 4 I opened up YouTube and boom the button was there so I could start casting from my nexus 4 as well I've been told or I've read sorry that there should be an iOS app coming out shortly as well so you can start to use some of that functionality too but anyways it's working right now on Nexus devices other Android devices and on my laptop I think the killer functionality for me is from my laptop to broadcast a real YouTube experience up to a bigger display and then still have the inherent YouTube functionality that comes with using a laptop like commenting rating and all those important elements that you can't currently get in a lot of the television based YouTube apps so anyway guys that wraps up this first look at the chromecast from Google $35 and you're getting a somewhat like an Apple TV experience this is a pretty compelling product as I said earlier in the video you can check out the links in the description I hope it's still not sold out though it might be if you guys enjoyed this content please remember to leave a thumbs up down below and I'll catch you on the next episode later and then what looks like a little button