Every time I sit down in front of my TV and pick up the remote, I am reminded of the mistake that I made a couple of years ago when I decided that Google’s then-new Chromecast was good enough for my use. At the time, I was moving from Lebanon to France and I was faced with a decision: carry my 2017 NVIDIA Shield TV or my 2020 Chromecast with Google TV (4K)? I picked the latter and I’ve since regretted that choice many times. The Shield TV was near perfect and now all I really want is for NVIDIA to make a newer one.
Three reasons made me go with the Chromecast with Google TV as my Android TV box of choice: it was newer, it was running the more modern Google TV experience, and it was guaranteed to be the first one to get Google’s new features and experiments. Since I write about Android for a living, the last argument made everything else moot.