gdgt

Google's curious little media streamer is a beauty to behold but offers an unfortunate combination of high price and limited functionality.

Its combination of quirky styling, extremely limited functionality, and a $299 price tag has me completely mystified.

The Nexus Q's striking, orblike hardware can't outweigh the extreme limitations of this Android-only, Google-only media streamer.

So, what does the Nexus Q compete with? Nothing, really. At least nothing that’s available on the shelves right now. It’s an entirely unique product made for a very narrow audience, and its limitations will likely prevent it from succeeding as a consumer device.

For everybody else, this would be a cool novelty item (or it will be if once the bugs are worked out), but most people aren't going to pay that much for a novelty item. If Google can add more features and cut the price down, then it just might be impulse-buyable. Until then, this is a pass.

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...

Though the Nexus Q is a beautiful and easy-to-use piece of hardware, it suffers from a dearth of content and an unjustifiably high price.

Google's Nexus Q is a good-looking media hub, but its meager app selection and reliance on Android devices don't come close to justifying its high price.

Presumably Google will build out the Nexus Q, considering how powerful and well-made it is physically, but at the moment, it's so half-baked that I can't imagine recommending it to anyone. It costs more, does less, and works worse than its competitors.

With this device you’ve got an Apple TV for nearly every single Android device on the market, and since it is a Nexus device, Google has in so many words encouraged us to hack it ... Will people buy it at $299? That’s a different story entirely.

The Q isn’t on sale just yet, and that’s probably a really good thing. In its current form the software is too buggy to make it worth using at all, much less shelling out $300 for.

Currently, there are so many other devices that do exactly what you'd expect the Nexus Q to do, stream the media content that you currently consume, for much less money.

I don’t see the Nexus Q flying off the shelves anytime soon, but I can certainly see the potential in a device like this, and look forward to seeing what I consider to be a new approach at taking on the TV.

For now, no. Google has explained that the Q is basically an experiment, so we can’t quite give it a definitive verdict... It certainly speaks volumes about where the product stands after indefinitely being pulled from the Play store, but progress as been made in unlocking a brighter future.