By Want to browse the web while watching your favorite show? Or how about post a tweet or update your facebook status without ever leaving the comfort of your own sofa?
MIPS Technologies has announced, from CES, the capabilities to run set top boxes, Blu ray DVD players, and others on an Android platform. We showed you the other day that Android will soon be capable of running various appliances.
Western Mediabridge Inc. and Sigma Designs will demonstrate the first Android set top box at CES with such capabilities as video-on-demand, Word, Spreadsheet, Slide Show Presentation viewer software, web browser, all while maintaining a clear crisp 1080p video quality.
“With Sigma Designs’ and MIPS Technologies’ industry-leading performance and Android’s open and flexible platform, our Android-based STB is one of the most innovative STB solutions in the market. We anticipate there will be a lot of Android-based products and applications in the near future which will be connected to each other. Our belief is that the Android set-top box will be positioned as a main device among in-home Android-based multimedia devices. We will continue to add more applications, making a more feature-rich Android set-top box,” said Ernest Bang, president and CEO of Western Mediabridge Inc.
I don’t know about you but being able to surf the web, watch tv, and post to Phandroid all from the comfort of my sofa in my sweatpants sounds great to me!
Maybe this can pave the way for TV-video calling to other people too. One request I had for the BT vision set top box was that it notify you when you have an incoming landline call – since it is plugged into the broadband line. If Android can enable you to answer or divert calls while watching TV, that would be great. You’d never have to answer the phone mid way through a film; just to find out it was some telesales company, or your mum asking if you wore your thermal vest because of the snow. All you would do is click a button on your remote, or shout “android divert” / “android answer”, to have the audio blurt out the call/or ring the phone propely. All done whilst it pauses your film or live TV (as with SKY and hard-drive digital recorders). You could even integrate this with Google voice and the google voice recognition software. Job Done!!!
Is this why the Nexus One dock has it’s own bluetooth connection? so that we can control all of our stereo equipment with our phone? assuming our stereo equipment is compatible.
*drools* I want, I want!!
You and those sweatpants!
Does this mean we get a pimped out touchscreen remote with tabs that change the key layout for tv/dvd/cable…ect so you dont have 400 buttons on the face and it slides open to reveal a qwerty keyboard when you need to type?
Android is Skynet its going to take over the world, thank god Arnold is still around to save us!
@beezy, cool thought!
Would love to have a STB like that and be able to control it all via my Droid. Would be awesome to have my whole music collection on there, and have a jukebox app on my phone that controls the tunes on the STB from anywhere I am.
Or do what just about everyone that i know has been doing for 8 years and hook an old laptop up to your plasma. The only cost is a decent wifi keyboard like a DiNovo
it would be interesting if the remote had a laser that would allow you to click on buttons instead of a d-pad, like on wii.
i really like Android but having it running on microwaves, refrigerators, tvs and prety much every electronic sound like a bad idea. Windows=computers, Media players=ipods+Zunes and Android+iphone+smartphones is how its supposed to be
To be able to do all that in sweatpants….wow…dandy