Google Nexus Player review

Google’s Chromecast was a refreshingly simple device which let you get multimedia content onto TV. The bargain price certainly didn’t hurt its popularity either, although it definitely had some shortcomings. The Nexus Player is the Chromecast's bigger brother; it uses the full Android TV operating system rather than a bare-bones interface and has much greater potential to take over your living room.

The Asus-made Nexus Player is more akin to a Roku 3 or an Amazon Fire TV than the flash drive-styled Chromecast. The black hockey puck-shaped design has more in common with the Fire TV than the hard-to-ignore purple Roku 3, however. 

Unlike the Chromecast, the Nexus Player isn’t powered over Micro USB, so you can't reduce cable clutter and power it through your television's USB ports. It does have a Micro USB port built into the base, but this is only used for certain expansion options. It's underneath where you'll find the HDMI output, although it's only HDMI 1.4a - meaning no 4K support.

Wireless connectivity is one significant area where the Nexus Player has an advantage over its cheaper cousin; the Nexus Player has 802.11ac Wi-Fi over 2x2 MIMO antennas, whereas Chromecast is limited to 802.11n speeds. This occasionally made it difficult to stream local media over your network, especially if it was high bit rate video. The Nexus Player can be used as a Chromecast and 802.11ac means casting content from a NAS or local PC is a much smoother experience. We did notice when casting the entire screen from a connected smartphone that there was a lot of video compression and image artefacts when attempting to play games, however. There’s also a fractional delay between the connected device and what is shown on the Nexus Player.

The Nexus Player doesn't have an Ethernet connection, but you can add one using a generic USB to Ethernet adapter - another option that isn’t available on the Chromecast. The Micro USB port only operates at USB 2.0 speeds, however, so you can’t take advantage of full Gigabit Ethernet speeds even if you use a USB to Gigabit Ethernet adaptor. You'll also need to factor in the added expense on top of the device itself.

Using the Nexus Player as a Chromecast is a useful function, but its main selling point is Android TV. This brings the Android-like experience to the big screen, and can be navigated using the included remote control. The interface doesn’t differ drastically from what we’ve seen elsewhere on Roku or Amazon’s streaming devices, with large, easy-to-read tiles and icons that are perfect for a couch-based experience. It uses much of the Material Design styling you’re used to with Android 5.0.

Using the Nexus Player as a Chromecast is a useful function, but its main selling point is Android TV. This brings the Android-like experience to the big screen, and can be navigated using the included remote control. The interface doesn’t differ drastically from what we’ve seen elsewhere on Roku or Amazon’s streaming devices, with large, easy-to-read tiles and icons that are perfect for a couch-based experience. It uses much of the Material Design styling you’re used to with Android 5.0.

Three carousels of content on the home screen comprise the ‘Android TV Launcher’ that optimises the Android experience for the big screen. The first is recommended content, which draws from services including Google Play Movies & TV and YouTube. If you sign into third party services they will also be added to the list, as long as the developer has enabled support for it. With Plex, for instance, content from your Plex Media Server will also appear here.

A carousel for your apps appears underneath, although this could quickly become unwieldy if you install a lot of them. However, this is a problem you likely won’t encounter any time soon, due to the incredibly limited selection in the Play Store – more on this later. Finally, below this is a list of games that, in theory, could suffer from the same problem as apps but again isn’t an immediate issue due to a serious lack of content. 

The bundled remote control has four-way directional buttons with a select button in the centre – in many ways it's similar to Amazon's Fire TV remote, albeit with fewer buttons. Strangely the back button doesn’t mirror Android Lollipop’s design, opting for a left-facing arrow instead of a triangle, while the home button does use the now familiar circle.

Most notably, the remote has a built-in microphone, which lets you use voice commands for searching for content, much like the Amazon Fire TV. We didn’t encounter any problems with the Nexus Player recognising our voice and our searches for content garnered the results we were expecting. It also has a degree of universal search, so if you have an app like Plex installed, results will also include content from your Plex library. It's a major improvement over the slow text entry seen on the current Apple TV.

You can also use your Android-powered smartphone or tablet as a remote by installing a companion app and pairing your device to the Nexus Player through Bluetooth. This works in exactly the same way as the physical remote control but is a nice extra option although the tactility of the remote control is preferable. 

Navigating around the user interface is pleasingly responsive, thanks in part to the quad-core 1.8GHz Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM inside the Nexus Player. We didn't experience any delay or lag even when rapidly jumping between apps. Menus were nicely animated with the same wipes and circular burst animations we've seen on Android smartphones and tablets running Lollipop. There are other pleasant visual flourishes too, such as pulling up the home menu while watching a video that overlays it over your content. The interface is certainly much more visually engaging compared to the drab orange and greys of the Amazon Fire TV.

As the Nexus Player is essentially running the same Android 5.0 as on smartphones and tablets, albeit with a custom launcher, we were expecting healthy app support at launch, but unfortunately this is exactly the area where Android TV falls short. Very few apps have been updated with support for Android TV, meaning the available choices are currently extremely limited. A glance at the media-related apps and you’ll see that the only real notable inclusions are YouTube and Netflix. There’s no sign of any of the catch-up services such as BBC iPlayer or ITV Player. Similarly, there’s no sign of services like Now TV. It's perhaps no surprise Amazon Instant Video is missing given Amazon has its own media streaming box, but the lack of services is still somewhat shocking.

Music is equally barren, with the only notable inclusion being TuneIn radio. There’s no official Spotify app, no Napster and or Deezer, meaning the only real streaming music option is conveniently Google’s own Google Play Music service.

It is actually possible to ‘sideload’ Android apps on to the Nexus Player using a slightly convoluted process of connecting to the Nexus Player via FTP and installing Sideloader Launcher to access apps that aren’t supposed to work on Android TV. This can create problems, however, because some apps aren’t designed to be navigated using a remote control and are dependent on touch inputs. We tried getting Spotify to work through this method and couldn’t get past the sign in screen, as it was confusingly oriented horizontally. Similarly, while the BBC iPlayer app happily installed and we were able to navigate around the app, it’s not actually possible to start playing any content, rendering it useless. There’s no choice but to wait for the app to officially be available.

It shouldn’t be too difficult for developers to get their apps working on Android TV. We’re hopeful that support will improve over time. 

The dedicated Google Play Games app is slightly deceiving, as it's currently rather empty and initially made us think there simply weren't many games available for Android TV. However, the actual games catalogue is in the full Google Play Store app, with the Games app more for viewing you profile and monitoring your achievements. Games that you own on Android will also appear but you’ll find many of them aren’t currently compatible with Android TV, even the ones that seem ideal for GamePad use.

Head into the Play Store and there are a lot more options, with games broken into categories including those optimised specifically for the optional Nexus Player GamePad (around £35). It's a decently constructed controller that takes a lot of inspiration from the Xbox, with the ubiquitous dual analogue sticks and four trigger buttons. The sticks are responsive but we weren’t fond of the D-Pad, which doesn’t have enough travel. It compares favourably to the optional controller for the Amazon Fire TV, however.

Graphics power comes from an Imagination PowerVR Series 6 Graphics 2D/3DEngine. We weren’t able to benchmark the Nexus Player using Epic Citadel, as although we could side-load it we couldn’t get past the first screen using either the remote control or GamePad. Still, playing games such as the Mickey Mouse Castle of Illusion remake was an enjoyable and smooth experience. However, the Nexus Player only has 8GB of internal storage, which means once the games library does grow, you could potentially run out of space very quickly. Asphalt 8: Airborne is a 1.42GB download, for example. You can add extra capacity using a USB OTG flash drive, or an external hard disk connected with a USB OTG cable.

There might be more games than media apps, but the quality on offer isn’t the best. Android TV currently lacks a killer app to make investing in the optional GamePad a must have. 

The Nexus Player is a device with plenty of potential, but is currently let down by poor app support for Android TV. This is something that could quickly become rectified. What the Nexus Player does at the moment, it does well at least.

Android TV is quick and responsive and is a real pleasure to use on a big screen. The Nexus Player never slows down or feels unresponsive thanks to its good specifications, save for the paltry storage capacity. Using it for Plex in particular is a great way to get content to your television. As a Chromecast it does a better job than the original thanks to its superior connectivity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, if you make use of Google’s services you’ll get a lot of joy from the Nexus Player. However, until it gets better support from third-party apps, the Nexus Player is yet to be the perfect media streamer.