First Impressions of Google’s Chromecast

It’s definitely don’t think it’s ready for Primtime — Yet (But give Google a couple of weeks)

My Chromecast came today — which was a huge surprise. I ordered it shortly after it was announced on 7/24, and just a few hours before they ended the free Netflix offer. I was told it would take 3-4 weeks for it to be delivered, and I was hoping to have it by the end of August.But here we are, less than two weeks later, and I have it in hand.

Here are my impressions so far:

• It’s tiny — it is the size of a thumb drive. I know that the Roku and AppleTV are portable, but this can be slid into a pocket. One of the awkward things about it is that it will fit nicely into an HDMI port that is angled down to the sides of the TV, if may not fit well on TV’s where the ports face directly to the rear, especially if the TV is wall-mounted.
• Setup was easy — despite being awkward. The setup process took less than five minutes, and simply consisted of me going to a website on my iPad and providing Chromecast with the password to my Wi-Fi network. While the process was quick, it was a little convoluted — for example, in order to program my wireless network for the Chromecast, I had to switch my iPad’s wireless network to point to the Chromecast’s peer-to-peer network to do the initial programming.
• Casting was a breeze (mostly) — I simply opened youtube on my iPad, and voila — it worked, and the quality was pretty decent. I even added the Chromecast extension on one of my PC’s and I was able to broadcast web pages to the tv. While I was able to cast easily from two iPads and a PC, I couldn’t get my iPhone to recognize it.
• It’s good if all you care about is YouTube and netflix — short of Chrome on the PC, the only iOS apps that support Chromecast right now are YouTube and Netflix. For Chromecast to be successful, this list needs to grow.

I am going to play with it more over the coming days, and post some updates.