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Comment by heymishy | Hacker News Reader

my thoughts exactly - what does this give me that a chromecast doesnt? i dont care for a controller (or for games).

i can't think of anything this can do (that id want to do) that the chromecast cant for a lot cheaper.

My chromecast sits unused in a drawer because I hate to have to use my phone / tablet to watch TV (lack of tactile feedback, phone lock timeout, and being distracted by work email when I'm trying to relax). This thing has a remote, which is a huge win for me. Maybe it even has an IR receiver (or one could be plugged in via USB), which would allow better integration with my harmony.

Also, you'll probably be able to side-load xbmc on it without rooting, like you can on a Ouya, an Amazon FireTV or (rooted) AppleTV to get full access to your media library, to act as a PVR front end, & to give you access to the vast world of shady XBMC plugins.

The open question for me is what sort of video the thing will be able to play back natively. And whether or not you can side-load Amazon Instant Video

It does have the voice search, which might be very nice.

Also, it will run your Play Store apps. So, presumably GMail, Calendar, Drive, Maps... and not just the 'cast version of them, but the real deal.

would you really want to interact with gmail, drive, etc with this xbox-ish controller?

Chrome cast mirrors a screen and requires a separate device to control, this can run actual applications.

This is a common misconception. Chromecast runs "actual applications", which are controlled by an application on a separate device like a phone or tablet. One of those applications (I believe the least useful one) enables you to mirror a display from the controlling device. But most of the applications are things like netflix, google play movies, and hbogo - very similar to the nexus player.

By run actual apps, I mean actually run the app's code on the device. There is no netflix app for the chromecast, it requires a separate device with the netflix app.

The chromecast is a glorified wireless hdmi dongle.

I guess I'm being pedantic by saying that there is clearly an application running on the chromecast, which the controlling device sends information to, because it's admittedly more like a dumb proxy for the application running on the controlling device. But it's not like it is completely dependent on that device - you can turn on a movie and turn off your phone while you watch it.

Yea I understand that, I know there's an actual CPU running actual code but I was trying to make the distinction between a full blown app and something that just streams a url given to it by a device.

For most purposes the Chromecase doesn't really act like an hdmi dongle. With Netflix for example, the chromecast does all the streaming directly from Netflix. The Netflix app on the phone just tells the chromecast what URLs to play. Once it's streaming, you can power the phone off if you want.

Chromecast runs an app inside that does the streaming.

Phone/tablet just setup the URL for the stream.

You can easily verified this by setup the chromecast to stream from youtube with a phone after it start play, you can turn off the phone and and it would still be playing.

The phone/table for chromecast is just a fancy remote control.

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