Nexus q media player

The entire upper half of the Q is a free-spinning volume knob, while a pinprick blue LED eyes you from the front. That single LED isn't a mere stylistic touch; it also reveals the location of the Q's touch-sensitive mute button. A set of banana-style connectors give the option of hooking up external speakers directly, taking advantage of the watt amplifier built into the device. It turns out that banana connector option can be more handy than you'd think at first. When trying to swap the Q into my own entertainment system, I discovered that the recessed optical audio port was actually too narrow to plug in the cables I use for my other devices.

It's not a deal-breaker by any means — and Google does ship a Micro HDMI to HDMI cable with the streamer — but I couldn't help but think that some practicality had been jettisoned to achieve the tidy set-up on the back of the Q. There's no denying it's an attractive piece of hardware, however. The matte finish looks good and feels great, and the base of the Q is weighted just so ; the Q practically begs you to touch it.

It does have a tendency to pick up smudges and smears rather quickly, though they wasn't very noticeable when it was sitting next to the television. Making the leap from hooked-up to up-and-running was a bit more difficult than anticipated. The Q has no interface of its own, and requires an Android device to manage it and initiate any media streaming. Not that you'd know that when you power the Q on; instead, you're presented with an image of a blue sphere on your television, along with the word "hello" in several different languages.

Upon launch you select what room the Q in question is located in, enter the password for your Wi-Fi network, and you're good to go I had connectivity problems with multiple devices, on two different Q units. It wasn't clear if excessive Wi-Fi interference was the problem, or something within the hardware itself, but the streamer is definitely finicky about connecting with other devices. Given the Q's lack of interface, the only way to change settings are via an external app.

It's a relatively bare-bones affair, unsurprisingly called Nexus Q. You can adjust the brightness of the LEDs on any of the Qs you have connected in your home it's designed to allow the use of multiple devices in a single location , turn off the various output jacks, or change the visuals that play back when you're listening to music more on that later. It's perfectly functional, but it does feel clunky to be using an app to control such basic settings, especially when under the hood the Nexus Q is running Android 4.

Given that pedigree, the separate management app makes sense, but it would be a much more intuitive experience if Google took advantage of that HDMI output to let users perform these tasks directly. The trick here is that it's not actually streaming from your phone or tablet at all; rather, your device is serving as a glorified remote control, telling Google's servers to send media down to the Q over the web. When running Play Music, for example, an icon appears next to the share menu icon.

Tapping it allows you to switch the music from playing on the device to playing on the Q, and the transition was usually quick and seamless. Several times one device or the other would lose connection, requiring me to quit the Nexus Q app, but things came back online immediately thereafter. The good news is that along with Play Store content, any tunes you have stored in Google Music are also available for playback.

The bad news is that's it. Any sideloaded music files are out of bounds unless you upload them to Google Music first, and subscription services like Rdio and Spotify are locked out altogether. It's the same story on the video side: Hulu and Netflix customers, you're out of luck. In terms of sound quality, the watt amp was more than loud enough to fill my apartment, and in conjunction with the speakers I was using provided a clean and detailed sound.

In this sense, the Q would be a fine choice for someone hosting a party, or looking for an audio system for the backyard. During music playback, the LED ring on the Q pulses and breathes various hues in sync with the rhythm and volume of the music. It's joined by a visualizer on the TV, with five different "themes" available via the Nexus Q app. The LED ring is undoubtedly fun; it brings a touch of whimsy to the Q, and only adds to its physical appeal.

The visualizer is another matter altogether. It's simply another riff on the same visual gimmickry we've been seeing in audio visualizers for years now — and it feels like it.

Attempting to mute the Q during playback revealed another of its hardware weaknesses. Namely, it doesn't work that well, repeatedly requiring several taps to mute or restore audio during playback. Google is touting the Q as the "world's first social streaming media player," primarily due to its collaborative playlisting: friends can come over and play their own music on your Q, or you can build a group playlist together.

It's a feature with great appeal — there have been versions of the same idea on competing platforms for a while now — but the Q stumbles in the execution. While tapping on the options for a given song allows you to add it to the current song queue, selecting that same song directly will immediately begin playback, bypassing what's already in the queue.

Even worse, if you're viewing a list of tunes in playlist, album, or artist sort, selecting one song will add it plus all subsequent songs to the queue. Testing the feature out with a friend quickly pivoted from a fun musical collaboration into a frustrating game of accidental playlist-jacking.

To be fair, this implementation problem could be resolved with a software update — but this is the marquee feature of the Q. Later in January the project was quietly shelved, and support the app was phased out of the Play Store in May A content site for startups founders. We publish weekly interviews and short and long-form articles to help you become a better founder. Nexus Q Digital Media Player.

Cause of Failure Nexus Q was announced in , and Google immediately started accepting pre-orders. More G o o g l e Cemetery Posts. Google Code. Google Goggles.