The whole world got excited when Google announced that they had partnered with some major players to release a TV product based on the Android platform.  Google TV was announced, demoed and released to the consumers, but the product that everyone expected was not the product everyone received.  The whole experience felt rushed and unpolished and early adopters thought it was cool, but nothing exceptional. The nail in the coffin happened when many of the major networks and streaming media sites started blocking the Google TV systems from accessing their content and slowly the Google TV experience dwindled to a home media box with a few bells and whistles. OK, maybe it wasn’t the nail in the coffin, but it made your purchases more useless than a computer in your office.  At least the computer in the office can still access Hulu.

The original promise from Google, Sony and Logitech was that we would have Android Market access in early 2011.  I’m not sure what the definition of ‘early’ is, but I think we may be past it.  I’m a patient person, and I like to have things delivered in full working and bug free order, but I do feel that Google TV should have been improved and updated by now.

There are many basic things in Google TV that are not consistent and could have easily been improved.  It feels like the whole system was written by different groups and then thrown together at the last minute without any thought or integration testing.

Yes, we’ve had a couple of minor updates and the latest v1.3 update fixed a few things and added a couple more, but it really didn’t enhance the product in any way.  It would be nice if we at least had access to some of the more basic Google apps like chat and Gmail.  You’d think that throwing a couple of bones at us every so often and adding some applications wouldn’t be too much to ask.  What does it take to convert an application to run on the Google TV platform, it is Android isn’t it?  There may be a Google TV API that needs to be written for, but surely the basic Android framework is intact and altering a few application to handle a different screen resolution wouldn’t be too difficult.  Logitech’s product manager, Ashish Arora announced in early March that the Android Market update was coming soon. So where is it?
And when is Google going to start announcing some basic agreements with the networks and allow us to access more streaming content from the likes of ABC, Hulu and more?  I thought IPTV was all the rage and the focus of Google TV was to integrate what we watch with enhanced digital content!

The point of this article is not to gripe about the software or lack of software for Google TV, but to find out once again where our updates are.  Where is our Android Market access? At least allow us to install or own APKs and remove them if we find they don’t work.  Google should at least give us (and the other 3rd party developers) the opportunity to throw us some apps.

You can keep an eye on the Google TV Blog and they will tell you all about the cool Indian Premier League events that you can access on Google TV, but they don’t talk much about future software updates.

What are you expecting from Google TV?  What applications do you want to see on your big screen HD TV?