Google TV isn’t going anywhere quite yet. While there are some concerns if it will be getting more updates and enhancements as time goes on which are very valid concerns considering the lack of information from Google on their TV service, other manufacturers are keeping it alive. One of those companies is Vizio, best known for their affordable televisions and other electronics.
Vizio launched their new mini set top box dubbed the Co-Star which is Google TV enabled. They opened up pre-orders just two days prior and after finally going live, the box sold out in less than 12 hours. The company announced the great news on their Google+ page.
While the first batch of orders did sell out, Vizio said they have a second batch of pre-orders up which ended up selling out as well. There are no hardware specs available at the moment, but according to the product website, the Co-Star comes with a remote with a built-in touchpad, keyboard, streams 1080p video and 3D, access to TV, movies, games, and apps, and surf the web with Adobe Flash and HTML5 support.
The box itself has 2 HDMI out ports, a USB 2.0 port, and LAN for ethernet cable hookup in case you don’t have or don’t want to use Wifi. Priced at just $99, it’s a far cry from the Logitech Revue which was the first Google TV enabled set top box that came out and at the time of launch, cost a steep $299.
As the product makes its way to customers, we’ll get to see what people really think of it and hopefully it’s a much improved experience from existing Google TV products. Vizio seems to have done a really solid job on the design, both of the box and their remote and keyboard. Let’s hope the performance is really solid as well.