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Comment by mjibson | Hacker News Reader

The Q's hardware is capable of much more than the software currently allows. Hacking it was explicitly encouraged at I/O. All of the negative points in the article can be fixed with software updates. Seeing as this is a brand new product, the software currently has minimum functionality to show off its two new features: control via tablet, social playlists.

I predict that in the next year the Q will get software support for:

- iOS devices as a controller

- other computers on your network as a controller (web interface or chrome app or something)

- netflix/hulu/other stuff streaming support

- music/video streaming from local network devices

- streaming all audio output from a device (like my desktop computer) to the Q, so it can be used as a stereo device instead of just an output device

However, assuming all of those features were added, I'm still not sure I'd pay $300 for it.

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Have there been products in the past that were underwhelming at launch but later software upgrades to it to add features made it a big hit?

I think these devices, especially at $300, need to be attractive at launch to become hits. Adding features 6-12 months down the line doesn't seem to ever turn a lagging product around - launch is the time when potential consumers are paying the most attention.

The HP Touchpad did that. Not because of the features per se, but the price drop allowed everyone to grab one, which brought more features along with it. Unfortunately it didn't translate into more production.

The iPhone. It wasn't terrible to begin with (a fancy phone with a decent web browser), but it became a whole different product after the SDK was released.

Not the same: the iPhone was the first mobile phone with a good web browser. (A year or two after it went on sale, there was an article that made it to the front page of HN in which Google revealed that a full 99% of visits from smartphones to Google were coming from iPhones.) The iPhone was very compelling to large numbers of people as soon as it went on sale.

You're kidding, right? You're offering the iPhone as your example of a product where the public was underwhelmed at its launch?

People don't seem to remember that the iPhone really was a pretty crappy phone on launch day, in a lot of ways. It crashed constantly, didn't do a lot of things that other phones already did, and had audio-quality problems. In the parlance of the times, it wasn't a smartphone, it was an expensive feature phone.

What turned the iPhone into a serious product, from my own point of view, was the regular stream of updates and bug fixes that Apple provided. I didn't like my iPhone very much at first, but it just kept getting better, through no effort or expense on my part. I wasn't accustomed to buying electronic devices that magically got better over time. They won at least one loyal customer with that approach, and influenced the way I do business today.

While that's all true, people still lined up a few days in advance to get one. Kind of difficult to make the point that the public was underwhelmed by it at release.

Google TV is another Android platform that plugs into an entertainment system, and Google recently revamped it, with third-party manufacturers expected to launch new iterations of it this year at or around the $100 pricepoint. I see no reason, hardware-wise, that a Google TV STB couldn't do all of the things in your list, with the right apps on top of it, so even if your predictions come true, of the $300 you'll be paying, $200 will be for it to come pre-installed with software that will probably be available from a third party for the GTV for $5.

The only thing you get with this that doesn't ship standard with the GTV boxes announced so far is an amp, but the amp in the Q is pretty puny, and if you're hooking it up to an existing sound system, you won't use it anyway.

I assumed that sharing media to the Q would show up as a new intent in the Jelly Bean SDK but I haven't seen anything to that effect yet. Hopefully something like that will be in the SDK soon!

The feature it needs for $300 is an API. Tap your phone, and it sends over the app (not a stream, the .apk itself), while said app on your phone becomes a controller.

I hope it'll get an Ubuntu for Android port.

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