Sony NSZ-GS7 review pictures

Previous

Next View full Gallery

All I ask of a set-top box is that it slide easily and unnoticed into the stack of boxes and gadgets next to my TV. Sony meets that criteria with the 1.3-pound GS7, and still manages to inject at least a little bit of design flair into the device. It's a glossy, black rectangle, a little big at 8 inches wide and 1.3 inches tall, with a curved front so that there's a slight lip on the top. The top has slightly raised dots all over it, which are nice-looking, but you'll probably never see the top and almost definitely won't ever notice it.

There are no controls or buttons anywhere on the device, and all the ports are on the back — after fuming at all the devices requiring USB cables to stick out the front, I couldn't be happier. You get HDMI in and out, digital optical out (for audio), an IR blaster, ethernet, two USB, and a big two-pin power adapter. It's a solid selection of ports, letting you connect a couple of external drives or devices to the GS7, though I'd always like an RCA connection for the legacy devices I just can't get rid of. Thanks to wide file support, the GS7 is an excellent conduit for playing back content you have stored on hard drives, in addition to all the streaming capabilities.

Since everything is on the back of the GS7, the sides and bottom are used for vents. Thank goodness: the GS7 gets remarkably hot when it's in use, even with all the vents and fans working away. It's not very loud, though, and I guess that's the tradeoff — you won't hear it when you use it, but don't put the GS7 on top of anything that can melt.

I get that designing and building a remote for a Google TV product must be hard. It needs to feel like a remote and be easy to use with one hand, but it also needs to have a QWERTY keyboard, a touchpad, lots of input buttons, various specific navigation keys, and oh so much more. We've seen all sorts of different solutions to this problem, from the giant keyboard and mouse for the Logitech Revue to the cramped, complicated remote that ships with Sony's Google TV-enabled televisions.

Sadly, Sony still hasn't solved the remote riddle. The GS7 comes with a clicker that does feel considerably more like a remote than the game controller-like accessory for the company's TVs. On one side of the hefty, .75-inch thick slab are the remote-like buttons: six power and input controls up top, and playback controls plus a few colored function buttons on the bottom. In between, there's a matte black, clickable trackpad below a five-way directional button and four Google TV controls. The four Google TV buttons mostly mirror the Android controls: you get Home, Menu, and Back, but Android's Search button is swapped for a picture-in-picture toggle that lets you watch live TV in a small (sadly unmovable) window while you do something else.

Where the power button might be on a cell phone (on the right edge as you hold it vertically), Sony added channel and volume controls, plus a Mute button. I love this: it means you can quickly pick up the remote to mute the TV or easily flip channels, without having to hunt for buttons at all. Touches like this do a lot to make Google TV easier to navigate, but I'd hardly say this remote passes the babysitter test — there's almost no way you could hand it to a stranger and have them figure out how to use it with no help.

On the back of the remote is a full, five-row QWERTY keyboard, with backlit rubber keys. As much as I like having a full keyboard on a remote (and as much as it's necessary on a Google TV device), this isn't a particularly good one — the keys are mushy and cramped, and so many keys have more than one symbol on them that it's often hard to find the one you're looking for. Having keyboard and trackpad on opposite sides is surely a space-saving move, but it means you'll constantly be flipping the remote over to mouse around, then turning and rotating it to type. The remote's three-axis motion sensitivity automatically disables the trackpad when you flip it to the keyboard side so that you don't accidentally move the cursor while you type, which is appreciated.

Speaking of the three-axis motion sensitivity, it sounds a lot better than it is. In theory, it gives you tilt controls for games — you could use the remote like a steering wheel in a driving game, for instance. In practice, it just doesn't work well: while playing Dot I had the same trouble leaving the left edge of the screen that Nilay did way back at CES, and even once I figured out exactly how to hold the remote (flat), it's way too finicky to be useful.

All that said, this is still one of the best Google TV remotes yet — it's just still not a very good one. I much prefer the Boxee Box's remote, which does a better job of incorporating a keyboard and extra functionality into a remote that still feels like... a remote. Fortunately, there's a great iOS and Android app that connects automatically to your Google TV device (as long as they're connected to the same Wi-Fi network) and gives you much simpler and more useful controls. If you own a smartphone on either platform, downloading the app should be step one after buying the GS7.

Under the hood, the GS7 features a new ARM-based Marvell 1500 processor, the same one inside nearly every device in the wave of Google TV products announced at CES. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi (still 2.4GHz-only) are also built in, but the the dual-core 1.2GHz SoC is the flagship improvement. It's considerably more powerful than the previous processors inside Google TV devices, and the spec bump matters — there's almost no interface lag, and everything happens a full beat faster than it used to. The blue, spinning "Loading" wheel almost never shows its face, though it's not totally gone. HTML5 apps don't run totally smoothly, and neither do Flash websites, but both are vastly improved. The Marvell chip was designed specifically for Google TV products, and it shows.

Google TV

"Google TV" is really a few things. On the one hand, it's a universal search engine and navigational interface for everything you want to watch. If you have both Netflix and cable, Google TV is designed for you — it's a great way to find stuff to watch. Search for "Arrested Development," and you'll see not only where it's playing on live TV, but which episodes are available on Netflix. It's a giant improvement on most cable TV interfaces, too, and makes it much easier to figure out what you want to watch and how you can watch it. Want to watch the Yankees game? Type in "Yankees," and you'll see everywhere the team is on right now.

If you're a Dish network subscriber, the integration goes even deeper: you can include your DVR in the search, or quickly set something to be recorder. If you have another provider, you still get basic navigational features, plus the great search engine.

Whenever you press the Search button on the keyboard side of the remote and enter a query, Google TV searches first for shows and movies including your query. "House" is a fairly wide-ranging search term, but Hugh Laurie's show comes up first because odds are, that's what you're looking for on your TV. Of course, you can also search the web from the same interface, or just enter a URL — the search bar is the core of the Google TV experience. Generally, if you know what you want to watch, it's awesome. It's not great for saying "what's on that might be fun to watch?" or for channel surfing, but if you're jonesing for some Arrested Development you won't find it faster any other way.

Not knowing what you want to watch is where the TV and Movies app comes in. When you first launch the app, you're asked to rate a bunch of movies and shows — in my case, I gave between one and five stars to Titanic (four stars, solid movie), Mission: Impossible (five stars, obviously), Love, Actually (also five stars), Family Guy (three stars, not as good as it used to be), and a dozen or so more. Recommend carefully, because Google TV uses your ratings to provide an endless stream of things you might want to watch. It's essentially a TV Guide centered around content instead of channels — Peel has done something similar, as has TiVo, both to excellent effect. Pick a show or movie from the list, and you're presented with options for how to watch it that include watching it on live TV, buying or renting from Amazon Instant Video, or streaming from Netflix or HBO Go. It's a whole new paradigm for how you watch TV: not "what's on?" but "where can I watch what I want to watch?"

Unfortunately, Google's attempt to answer that second question only makes it more obvious how much Google TV is missing. Without support from Hulu or even most of the networks — none of which have apps, and nearly all of which block Google TV devices from streaming content — there are too few places for Google to search. This is a running problem for Google and plenty of other set-top box manufacturers, but it makes it hard to recommend any Google TV device over a Roku box and its many content sources, or a cheap home theater PC, which has completely unfiltered access to streaming internet content. What good is an awesome search function if it's only searching four sources?