With the flood gates of news coming out of CES – despite the event not starting for a few days – we’re all interested to see where Google and Android will feature during this year’s CES. Google have confirmed in a recent blog post on their Google TV blog that ASUS will be showing off a new Google TV device at CES. It seems like this new device from ASUS could well be the ASUS Qube, a device that we covered passing through the FCC late last year.
Not much is known about the Qube from ASUS, although it’s speculated that this could be a replacement for the Nexus Q that suffered an early retirement at the hands of Google. Something strange surrounding the ASUS Qube is that apps designed to work with the device were published to the Play Store while they were still in a rough form. Perhaps the latest version of Google TV will feature heavier integration with Android on smartphones and tablets – just like the Nexus Q promised. The Qube appears to be some sort of dongle that plugs into your TV and offers Google TV with little intrusion into the living room, this sort of thing could work well with the right pricing as America doesn’t seem like it wants “yet another box” underneath their TVs.
As well a device from ASUS, the Google TV blog post confirmed that devices from LG, Vizio, Sony, and “others.” Just who these “others” might be is a little interesting and could mark the entry of some new players into the Google TV world. 2012 has been a year with a drip feed of devices being launched, such as the Hisense Pulse and Vizio’s CoStar. Through low-pricing it’s been proven that there is a place for Google TV in our living rooms, with more manufacturers and partners behind the service, it’s only going to get bigger and better.
We’ve been hearing rumors of a new version of Google TV coming soon and if there’s more hardware to be announced at this year’s CES then this would as good a place as any to unveil something new. Google have done very little, in the grand scheme of things, to get the word out on Google TV and if they’re not careful they could find Google TVs come below than “smart TVs” in consumers’ minds.
No matter what gets announced – or even released – during CES, we’ll have all the latest news!
[Source: Google TV Blog]