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LG Smart TV with Google TV hands-on photos and video

LG Smart TV with Google TV hands-on photos and video

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We just spent some time with LG's Smart TV with Google TV — it's the company's first TV running the Android-based OS, and it's added some interesting twists to the usual formula.

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We just spent some time with LG's Smart TV with Google TV — it's the company's first TV running the Android-based OS, and it's added some interesting twists to the usual formula. Of particular note is the remote, which has a scroll wheel in place of the center button on the D-pad and eschews a touchpad in favor of Wii-style motion control for the mouse. The motion control works about as well as the original Wii, which is to say it's fairly imprecise. The scroll wheel / D-pad combo is genius — or it would be genius if scrolling web pages wasn't incredibly choppy and slow. We'll chalk all of these glitches up to early software and misaligned calibration after a hard day on the CES show floor for now, but things will have to get significantly smoother for this to work as an everyday navigational tool.

Apart from that, LG's overall skinning effort is fairly nice — it's definitely much more tasteful and refined than anything we've seen the company put on its phones, and it makes things like changing inputs and tweaking settings fairly easy. LG's not saying when this thing is coming out or how much it'll cost, but we're guessing it'll be at least few months to get polish and performance up to par.

LG Smart TV with Google TV hands-on photos

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