It is a beautiful black sphere designed and manufactured by Google in California. That’s a switch from Google’s usual hardware game plan, in which a company like Samsung or Asus manufactures the Google phone or tablet.
The Nexus Q is Google's first media streamer, a sphere proudly made in the U.S.A. that streams audio and video to speakers and/or TVs, using an Android device as a remote. It's also horribly restrictive and limited in functionality–but it has potential, providing either Google or industrious hackers put in some hard work.
The Q looks like a Magic 8 Ball designed by Porsche. It has a matte finish and a ring of color-changing light around its equator. The back panel has a micro HDMI port, an Ethernet port, an optical audio output and four banana-plug ports for high-end speakers. If your speakers don’t have banana-plug jacks, you’ll have to supply your own adapters. Inside, there’s a 25-watt amplifier and Wi-Fi circuitry.
Nexus Q streams your favorite entertainment directly from the cloud to your living room. Just use the Google Play and YouTube apps on your Android phone or tablet to surf an ocean of music, TV, movies and videos, and Nexus Q will play it all on the biggest speakers and screen in the house and there are no downloads, no syncing, no running out of space.
The Best feature of Q is its socoal networking feature as you can create playlist and share with your friends.If you or the friend then taps the name of a song in your online Google account, it starts playing immediately, rather than being added to the queue as you’d expect. A Google rep explained to me that you’re not supposed to tap a song to add it to the playlist; you have to use a tiny pop-up menu to add it. More bafflement.
Google must have bigger plans for this thing. It’s wildly overbuilt for its incredibly limited functions, and far too expensive. For now, I can think of only one class of customer who should consider buying the black Nexus Q sphere: people whose living rooms are dominated by bowling-ball collections.
