Sony NSZ-GS7 Internet Player with Google TV review

Google TV has been around in the US for some time now, but the company has delayed introducing the concept to the UK so far. In this small Sony box, however, the service finally makes its UK debut. The idea behind it is a simple one: it takes your regular Freeview, satellite or cable TV content and adds internet streaming and web browsing to it – it takes a standard television and adds smart TV features.

It does this by passing your the HDMI signal from your regular TV set-top box through input and output ports on the rear to your TV at the end of the chain. The box runs Android – a heavily modified version of Honeycomb 3.2 to be specific – and this is what you use to access the internet. The connection is via an Ethernet port on the rear or built-in single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi.

On first boot, you’re asked to sign in to your Google account, or set one up, and anyone who’s used an Android phone or tablet will be at home immediately. Apps are installed via the Google Play store and launched via a vertically scrolling launcher. Web browsing, meanwhile, is carried out via Google Chrome. There’s no widget-based desktop, though; hit the home button on the remote control and a row of shortcut apps pop up along the bottom of the screen, overlaid on top of whatever activity you happen to be indulging in at that time.

The row of apps displays a clock and Android notifications on the left, and links to live TV (via the HDMI input), the Play store, Chrome, plus YouTube and Sony Entertainment apps. You can sign in and buy music and SD/HD movies (or rent them) through this portal in much the same way that you can on Sony’s Android tablets.

One of the Internet Player’s key features is to provide internet access – via the browser or an app – while you continue to watch TV. It does this via a picture-in-picture box in the top-right corner of the screen, which displays the content from the HDMI input on the box’s rear. You can use this to look up stuff on the internet while you’re watching TV, or to keep an eye on the football while watching a streamed program on BBC iPlayer.

The USB 2 slots on the rear, meanwhile, allow you to connect accessories or play video from local storage. Sony says the box will play most file types, including MKVs, aside from AVCHDs, and it played our Full HD MP4 test files smoothly. However, we couldn’t get any of our test MKV files to play at all.

In use the box is simple to operate and that’s mostly due to its ingenious double-sided remote control, which connects via Bluetooth. On one side is a backlit, five-row Qwerty keyboard – handy for tapping in searches, URLs and short tweets. On the other is a clickable touchpad for mousing around web pages and clicking links, surrounded by a D-pad and a handful of other navigation controls.

These controls include the familiar Android home, menu and back shortcut buttons, which make navigating the system quick and simple. The rest of the buttons are universal controls that allow you to use the remote to control your TV or other set-top box via the IR blaster included in the box, and there’s even a three-axis motion sensor for playing games, although we couldn’t find anything supporting it in the Play store.

The app model opens up all sorts of extra capabilities. You can add DLNA media streaming via an app, allowing video to be streamed from a compatible NAS drive; there are games to play and even an app that will display tweets at the top of the screen while you’re watching live TV – you have to set the search criteria manually, though.

It sounds good, but the box isn’t without its foibles. For starters, you don’t get the full selection of Play store apps to choose from, only a subset approved for use on Google TV devices. There’s no access to Google’s movie downloads and rentals – the only integration on this front is the Sony Entertainment stuff and Netflix. At the time of writing there was no BBC iPlayer app available for install either, although this is less of an issue since streaming from the website works well enough.

If you were thinking this would be the ideal appliance for browsing the web on your TV, you’ll need to be aware that Chrome on this browser feels extremely sluggish. Scrolling up and down is painfully slow on many websites, especially on the sort of hefty video-centric pages you’re likely to be accessing. We ran the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark on it, which finished with an average result of 4,222ms – much slower than your average Android tablet. Even the simplest games installed from Google Play, meanwhile, stuttered and stalled.

Google TV is certainly a nice idea, and in some ways it works very well. The remote control is excellent, it plays streaming Full HD content and compatible USB-connected content smoothly, and the apps provide the opportunity to expand the features of the box over time. For now, however, the price at £199 inc VAT is way too high for a device with this many rough edges.

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