Nexus Player – One Year Later
It has been almost a year (11 months and 10 days from the invoice date) since I purchased my Asus Nexus Player, and here is my 1-year brief review. I want to say that the Nexus Player is awesome, but the Nexus Player is about as useful as a paperweight in the digital age. It works o-kay for the most part, but there are allot of things missing that I can get on the iOS-based Apple TV. Sure, I can side load apps, but the app might not work properly. For instance, I can install Chrome from the Google Play store (using a browser directly from the app store, and it will work for very basic (and I mean basic) browsing, but when trying to stream video it will crash, freeze and become unresponsive.
What it does well
The Nexus Player works great as a Google Chromecast device. Streaming from Sony Xperia Z5 Compact or my Nvidia Shield I can easily stream videos from supported apps to my TV through the Nexus Player. The setup process is easier then Miracast (which my Sony Bravia TV supports), and it even works with some apps on my Apple iPad (like YouTube). It isn’t perfect though, and there are some apps that are hit and miss, but for the most part it does the job well. The Nexus Player is also a good streaming device for NetFlix, Hulu, and Youtube.
What it fails at
It fails at virtually everything else. You can install a web browser, but almost every web browser designed for Android TV felt like a half-baked compromise, and mostly unusable for true web browsing (crashing often). Many apps available for video streaming (Funimation, Hi-Dive, and Amazon Video just to name a few) just are not available. The few games I purchased were fine, but not so great that it would replace a Playstation or Playstation 2, and some of the games just crashed under the weight of Android Oreo and the small amount of memory available on the Nexus Player.
Comparison to the Apple TV
The two set top boxes do almost the exact same thing. The Nexus Player was released in late 2014 by Google, Intel, and Asus using Intel’s X86 Atom processors, and Google’s Android for X86. The Apple TV 4th Generation was released one year later using Apple’s A8 microprocessor (released one year prior). So there really isn’t a massive difference in technology. The major difference is in the finish of the product and the platform. The Apple TV 4th gen has more apps, and access to more games. The iOS platform that TVOS is based on is more finished, and the development ecosystem for TVOS is more complete. The Android TV platform feels rushed and since the Nexus Player was the poster child for the Android TV platform it feels rushed, and that translates into the entire platform. Even it’s Chromecast abilities are not up to the level of Apple’s Airplay.
Conclusion
It’s not that I dislike the Nexus Player, but both devices when they were released were brand new technologies. The 4th gen Apple TV was just more completed and polished on its release date, and Apple’s development tools for the Apple TV helped developers create a more finished product. The Nexus Player (near 4 years later) just seems to be a beta product that never matured. Whether it’s the development tools, the focus of android apps toward mobile devices, the Intel platform, or an inability to compete with Apple’s eco system. Or just chalk it up to a google project that got abandoned for bigger and better things. It just never made it to where it could properly compete with the Apple TV.
Photo from Asus
