Until now, if you wanted to mark the date of Google TV’s European launch in your diary, the closest you’d get was 2012. But the vagaries of the launch have just been made a little less vague thanks to Sony.
Showing off its Google TV set-top media boxes in London, the company said it was slating release for this summer. That suggests that either Google TV will be landing on these here shores before that, or someone at Sony hasn’t got his planning hat on.
We’re pretty sure it’s the former, which means we’re mere months away from dialling our Twitter feeds (or Google+) into a live TV stream, getting Android apps blown up to 42 inches and pointing our smartphones at the TV to switch to the other side.
And with that, we’re off to throw a couple of aging PVRs on to the sacrificial fire in the hope of getting that launch brought towards springtime.
The TouchPad has the same screen pixel density as the iPad 2 but makes more of all of that real estate thanks to the clever WebOS interface.
The second major metaphor is the “leaf.” This is draggable corner of many windows that exposes or hides more information. For example, you can open and close leaves in many applications including the Facebook app, adding layers of data to many apps.
Finally, there is the notifications system. This system is far superior to any other I’ve seen. There are lock screen notifications that can be acted upon and mail notifications, for example, are actually stacked, allowing you to flick through recently received mails right from the notifications bar. This is an excellent solution and alone could be considered worth the price of admission.
