Asus Cube with Google TV

Introduction Introduction The Asus Cube with Google TV is at first glance sleek and sexy with a extremely light body and perfected cube design. Asus pushes to fill a majorly over populated demographic with some new options and their own sense of style. Google TV has been something that many companies have been attempting to improve, usually through lots of trial and error. Building upon each others' devices we eventually reach the point of Asus' first foray into the shaky field. The question on everyone's minds is, "Did Asus manage to box up all of the entertainment we could ever need into one convenient location?" Specifications CUBE Specifications

Closer Look

A Closer Look You can see right away that Asus wasn't fooling around when they decided to name this. The device is a quite literally a 4.9x4.9x4.9" cube, combined with some sleek lines to give it a look that's interesting, yet not distracting below your TV. The front of the device brandishes the power indicator and the IR receiver for the included remote, along with a subtle Asus logo at the top right. Asus decided to keep the power indicator at a minimal level of brightness, so it's not distracting with the Cube either on or off. Moving to the right of the Asus Cube we have a single USB 2.0 port along with a very small hole. That's not just any plain hole though, there's a reset button hiding in there. Since the device lacks any sort of physical power switch this is a very simple but useful thing to have. At the rear we see the full line of ports at our disposal. From left to right, we have and IR out port, HDMI in, HDMI out, USB 2.0, 10/100 Ethernet, and DC in. If the Ethernet is not to your liking, there are also wireless capabilities in the form of 802.11n. In the accessories department we find the remote, AC adapter, user manual in CD form, a quick start guide, and the IR blaster cable. The remote is par for the course for Google TV devices. On one side, you have a QWERTY keyboard along with the usual navigation buttons. On the other, you have playback controls, navigation control, a bright red Netflix button, and a touchpad. Along the right side there is a voice command button and a button to enable the cursor for navigation. The touchpad can be used with the aforementioned side button to have a cursor just like you would on a PC. It works pretty well until you hit the raised arrows, where it gets a tad erratic. The other part of this touchpad is the buttons hidden below it. The four directional buttons are situated along the edge of the pad so it can be a bit tricky getting them to register a click, but the middle "OK" button is pretty consistent. If all of that was not enough, the remote has an accelerometer built in, so you can use tilt for games and moving objects on screen. On the keyboard side of things, the buttons are laid out surprisingly well. Hitting incorrect keys with my big thumbs was not a problem while using it for typing. My only wish was that the accelerometer could be used to disable the touchpad automatically when the remote was flipped over, as I found myself hitting it occasionally while typing. Interface A Look At The Interface Setup for the Asus Cube was a relatively straightforward process. If you have ever set up an Android device before you will be right at home with this, as it is running a modified version of Honeycomb. If you wish to, the IR blaster can be configured during the initial setup. The IR blaster is something that I was sceptical of at first, but found to be very simple to set up. If you have one of the TVs from a staggering list of manufacturers and models the setup is even easier. Otherwise, you just need to choose your manufacturer and go through a bit of trial and error until one of the codes works. You can easily toss your TV's controller aside once it's all setup. Once you finish the initial setup you are greeted with the Asus Cube user interface. Everything here is sorted by category on the left side of the cube, with up to six of the programs of that type filling up the right. The categories are: Favourites, TV and Movies, Games, Social and Life, Sports, Music, News, Education, and Photo. You can customize what you want to show up under each category, moving them around in any which order you please. You can also add widgets, although choices are sparse. The interface can take a bit of time to load up after switching between apps but I would not call it unbearable. Once the interface is loaded the navigation between categories is smooth. As you can see in the picture above, whichever app you have open when you decide to hit the home button will get put into the background until you go back to it or another app. Apps Apps The Asus Cube comes with a well rounded assortment of stock apps to choose from, handling streaming and local video, music, and photos. Your gateway to more apps, the Google Play Store, is also included. Do note that because this is Google TV, your app choices are limited. Asus has said that sideloading apps is a possibility however. A nice bonus included with the purchase of an Asus Cube is the inclusion of 50GB of cloud storage via the Asus WebStorage app. Chrome comes preloaded on the Asus Cube and works similarly to what you'd experience on any other Android device. This is where the remote shines bright as the option to turn the touchpad into a cursor is invaluable. If you aren't satisfied with the remote control, you also have the choice of using Asus' "Mobile Remote" Android app. This lets you control the Asus Cube from your Android phone or tablet. Overall it was a simple process and it worked well. The app found the Asus Cube on the local network quickly and prompted for a code that showed up on the TV. Once connected, the remote was snappy to my commands and worked without a hitch. That is, until my phone's screen timed out. The app disconnects when this happens, and then tries to reconnect. Rinse and repeat. This app adds some more functionality in the general realm of what you can do with Chromecast, albeit limited to Youtube. When playing a video on the Youtube app on your phone or tablet, a small TV shaped icon appears that, when pressed, starts playing the video on Asus Cube's Youtube app. (Might as well mention it since it's accidentally there; the top right corner is the HDMI passthrough picture-in-picture feature that I had been testing with a PS4.) Playback and HDMI Throughput Playback This section is going to be a case of the good, the bad, and the ugly when looking at video and audio playback. The good: Online streaming, such as Netflix, Youtube, and Google Play, is smooth as butter and the Asus Cube seems to have no trouble streaming reliably over both Ethernet and wireless. With local media on an NTFS formatted drive, various 720p and 1080p files played with no hesitation. On the music side of things, both FLAC and 320kpbs MP3 files played without a hitch. The bad: The interface can take a while to populate with everything on your network shares. Transitioning between folders is more of the same, especially when going back to a main folder with lots of subfolders. The ugly: I tried to test out a lot of different formats and resolutions for locally streamed media. For video, nearly every 1080p file I have failed to start over the network, including both .mkv and .AVI files. 720p was a bit better story, but the video quite often got stuck and buffered for a few seconds at a time, even after raising the amount of cache the app could use. I could not get a single music file to show up from my Windows shared folders. The next test was local streaming using Plex (DLNA). While my music was recognized, I could not get a single file to start playing. Video was an even scarier situation, where attempting to start many of my videos ended up in the Asus Cube either failing to start playback or flat out locking up. The good thing is that the restart button came in handy during these tests! HDMI Passthrough HDMI Passthrough One of the huge features that the Asus Cube boasts over the competition is the HDMI passthrough. This is catered highly towards cable boxes, DVRs, and receivers. You can browse TV guides, search for shows, and much more, even by voice control. The other thing you can do is use it to just pass through any HDMI device. I decided to plug my PS4 in and give it a whirl to see how the Cube handled it. I noticed no change in input lag when running my PS4 through it and playing Resogun, a very intense and twitchy game. Switching between picture-in-picture and full sized passthrough was also surprisingly smooth, audio and all. Conclusion Conclusion The Asus Cube provides users with a hub for all of their entertainment needs. You get a place to watch and listen to everything you could think of, all with the simplicity of a single device and remote. The Asus Cube itself seems to be a bit underpowered for the UI it powers and local streaming media playback leaves much to be desired. If your desire is online streaming as a supplement to your normal cable TV habits, this device should be a major consideration. Combined with the large set of apps created for this device, Asus has put a lot of effort in getting the Cube to shine over other Google TV offerings.