Among Google’s announcements at its big I/O conference for developers last week, one of the oddest was the Nexus Q, a beautiful black sphere designed and manufactured by Google in California. That’s a switch from Google’s usual hardware game plan, in which a company like Samsung or Asus manufactures the Google phone or tablet.
The Google Nexus Q.
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The Q looks like a Magic 8 Ball designed by Porsche. It has a matte finish and a ring of color-changing light around its equator. The back panel has a micro HDMI port, an Ethernet port, an optical audio output and four banana-plug ports for high-end speakers. If your speakers don’t have banana-plug jacks, you’ll have to supply your own adapters. Inside, there’s a 25-watt amplifier and Wi-Fi circuitry.
You’re supposed to plug the Q into your home entertainment system using an HDMI cable; at that point, it can play music, movies and TV shows that you’ve bought from Google’s online store. Simple screen-saver displays fill your TV screen during music playback.
You have to use your Android phone or tablet as a remote control; the device itself has no interface and no controls except for a volume control (you turn the entire top half of the ball).
You have to download a special app to control the Q. Right now, the app requires the latest Android version, Jelly Bean, on your phone or tablet. Google says older versions of Android will work when the Q goes on sale in July.
It won’t take you long to join the chorus of critics who’ve tried out the Q and had the same reaction: “What the — ?”
There are lots of boxes that connect to your TV and play music and video from the Internet: Apple TV, Roku and so on. They cost from $50 to $100. So what was Google thinking when
it designed a machine that does about one-tenth as much — and costs $300?
The second huge bafflement: The Q streams everything from Google’s music store or music storage service. Those are its only sources of audio. No music apps can send sound to the Q except Google’s Play Music app — no Slacker or Pandora radio, for example.
Incredibly, the Q can’t even play music that you’ve loaded on your phone or tablet. Again, what the — ?
You sit there on the couch, knowing that you can play music from some Google server hundreds of miles away, but that the tunes right on your phone, eight feet from the Q, are locked inside.
That also means that the Q can continue playing music from the Internet even when your phone and tablet are turned off. That happened to me a couple of times. I had no way to turn off the playback except to walk over and touch the glowing Mute dot.
The third question is: Why are the video options so limited? You can play videos from two online sources: YouTube and Google’s fledgling, poorly stocked TV and movie stores online. That’s it.
You can’t play videos that you’ve loaded onto your phone or tablet. You can’t play a slideshow of your phone’s photos on your TV. You can’t play shows from Hulu or Netflix. You can’t send the video output from your phone, tablet or computer to the TV, as you can with Apple’s AirPlay technology.
Video playback mostly worked fine, although it takes some time for the video to appear on your TV after you hit Play on your phone or tablet.
The Q presumably gets its name from “queue,” or playlist, and Google is especially proud of its multi-participant playlist feature. If you’re having friends over, and they, too, have Android phones, and they, too, have bought songs from Google’s music store, then they can add their own songs to your Q’s queue.
Sounds interesting in theory. In practice, there’s a lot of spontaneity-killing setup. You have to go into Settings to turn on the feature. Then you have to invite your friend to participate by — get this — sending an e-mail message. Then your friend has to download the Nexus Q app.
If you or the friend then taps the name of a song in your online Google account, it starts playing immediately, rather than being added to the queue as you’d expect. A Google rep explained to me that you’re not supposed to tap a song to add it to the playlist; you have to use a tiny pop-up menu to add it. More bafflement.
Google must have bigger plans for this thing. It’s wildly overbuilt for its incredibly limited functions, and far too expensive. For now, I can think of only one class of customer who should consider buying the black Nexus Q sphere: people whose living rooms are dominated by bowling-ball collections.