While Google TV isn’t officially dead, it might as well be. We have heard rumors that it would be renamed and relaunched in 2014 as Android TV. And it looks like Hisense spilled the beans a bit early. Hisense is showing off a nice little set top box at CES this week. Which is called the Pulse Pro, obviously keeping up with the Hisense Pulse naming scheme. It’s running software called “Android TV v4”. It’s not exactly Google TV, but it’s clearly built on the same foundation, with the same PrimeTime guide, and the ability to run Google TV apps. The Hisense Pulse Pro is said to be pretty impressive, according to those in Vegas this week able to check it out. They say one of the biggest improvements is the home screen, which lays out your content choices in a much more straight-forward way than standard Google TV software
The remote is said to be much simpler than your typical Google TV remote, it’s focusing on being able to easily jump to the content you want rather than offering a full keyboard. The need to type on a keyboard has been replaced with a built-in microphone. All you have to do is press the search button, then speak into the remote’s mic and it works within a few seconds. It worked well even at CES, on the show floor. Which as you can expect, is pretty noisy. Hisense has also added in the motion sensing to the remote control. The Pulse Pro’s pointer was actually very responsive. So for those times when you want to use a web browser on your TV, the remote will work quite well.
As far as availability and pricing goes, Hisense didn’t have any information on that front. But hopefully we’ll see it out on the market really soon. How many of you are interested in the Hisense Pulse Pro? Let us know in the comments below.
