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by ocdtrekkie
1642 days ago
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Reminds me of my Nexus Q: An extremely high quality, overspecced device, that Google deleted in order to replace the functionality with Chromecast, a drastically weaker, much poorer quality product. But hey, it sold better. |
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<dissolve/fade to flashback>
The team was "android at home" and the year was 2012. This was google's first effort at home automation, and besides $60 lightbulbs you could turn off wirelessly that nobody at the time needed, we had the Q. The main focus for Q was audio. Fancy, high quality audio. It had a very nice amp. It even had very fancy hardware to allow synchronized audio playback without software resampling (an oscillator we could change the frequency of to pull it to master's freq). There was a second device in the works - a cheaper one, since Q was not at all cheap to make. We had a huge TV in our area of the building. And one day, on said TV, we saw the announcement of chromecast. By google. This was the first any of us heard of it. It did 90% of what our device did, but we were targeting $xxx and it was $15... At this point in time, the android and the non-android parts of google did not communicate much, and kept many secrets from each other. I doubt the folks in the chrome team even knew of our project. At google IO we took preorders for the Q, but given this new "chromecast" thing, it made no sense to continue, so everyone who pre-ordered one got one for free, and no support was ever provided, nor were any updates. In theory, the android bits for it are published and you can build android for it just fine.