Lucky for us, one of the beta testers for Google TV decided to share in his fortune. This person posted some video and some pictures of the nearly finished interface and hardware. It does make it more real seeing this thing run on a tv in someones home. Excuse the ad before the video plays.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p7dyegxve4
The interface seems to be almost identical to when this was first announced with all of the menu items on the left and access to the search bar at anytime. The bookmarks layout is a little different than the original version and they have done some tweaking to the thumbnails.
The What’s on TV category is very cool looking. From what I understand this will work as long as your cable or satellite provider has some category metadata, which I think almost all of them do. In the picture above, notice the Amazon option. I bet this means you can get those 99 cent TV downloads we heard about right after the Apple TV announcement.
Navigation of Google TV is done via the keyboard pictured above. The top right has a track pad with some directional and home screen buttons. You can also use any Harmony controller or the Harmony Connect app.
The hardware looks good. It is small and hardly noticeable compared to the other boxes we all have in our living rooms and game rooms. Having USB and HDMI is a plus because it lets you use older and newer technology. Apple TV came out with this idea originally but it has never taken off for them. Now that Google is nearing completion, Apple lowered the price of Apple TV. Google has created quite a buzz about this product and I am very interested to see what the price point is going to be. I wish the reviewer would have showed us a little more like searching, but I do not think we will have to wait much longer before Google TV hits the world!