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Google TV in it’s current state is just short of being an excellent product.

Out of the box, it supports seamless DISH integration, various streaming services, a few preloaded apps, and Chrome.  I love the ability to watch television in the corner while I run an app or browse the web.  I’m even able to stream from Netflix or Amazon while watching television from DISH if I want to.

Another convenience of Google TV is the ability to quickly perform a Google search for a show.  I simply hit the designated key to pop up a search bar, type the show I want, and click on the show.  It brings up all kinds of information about the show including plot, cast, and showtimes.  At the click of a button, I can set my DVR to subscribe to it.  As of now the search catalog does not include Netflix streaming, hopefully that becomes an option in the future.

There’s no denying that the Google TV platform has endless possibilities, but it’s hard to tell just what those may be until they launch their app store sometime in the upcoming months.  Until then, it offers little more than other media center platforms like Apple TV, Roku, or Boxee Box.

I’m pretty late to the party, but the iPhone 4G has officially been announce.  It offers many upgrades over the previous generation of iPhone, as well as advantages over the competition.  It’s alredy been posted numerous times each and every feature, so I’m not going to reiterate each of them.

Here’s is what I like:

• That screen is beautiful.  It packs four times the pixels as the previous iPhone, and has the highest resolution of any mobile device in existence.
• That slim, shiny case with chrome edges, both stylish and practical.  Supposedly the edge is a new, revolutionary anntena that boosts signal for wifi, gps, and cellular data.  The glass exterior looks like clear crystal and is more durable than plastic.

Besides the hardware improvements iOS4 offers some significant software improvements that any iPhone 3G/3GS and iTouch 3G user will also be able to take advantage of:

• Multitasking… finally!
• App Folders

I didn’t mention FaceTime, the video chat feature, on purpose.  It just doesn’t really excite me.  They built it on an open-standard, but one that no one else is using.  Why not Skype?  Implementation aside, video chat has never taken off because nobody wants to use it.  Then again, who knows, maybe the iPhone is what VideoChat needs to be taken on by the masses.

I’m reluctant to allow myself to get too much into this game.  I love the God of War series, and it has always delivered a satisfying experience.  I’m mainly concerned with how games like this affect my life.  So to alleviate these concerns, I’m setting some rules:

1. I will not play anytime before 10pm.
2. I will not play beyond 2am.
3. I will not play for more than two hours per day.
4. I will not play for more than two consecutive days in a row.

In the past I have neglected my social life to play games for however long it took for me to finish a game.  I would stay up all night until day, and lose human contact for extended periods of time.  It has been awhile since I have divulged into a game; the last games I played were Infamous and Dragon Age, and, for awhile, I was addicted to them like crack.  Not this time game… not this time.

As I had posted last month, I built my first computer from scratch.  So far it has performed exceptionally well for media playback.  As soon as I had all of my media players configured and codecs installed, my computer handled 1080P HD Playback flawlessly.  The next phase of my testing was to determine the gaming capabilities of a relatively current game.

I purchased Dragon Age about a month ago.  I won’t go into too much detail about the game itself, but it’s a great game.  Initially I setup the game on it’s highest settings which would be 1080P resolution, high texture, anti-aliasing, and high graphics.  The game was playable, but it lagged quite a bit which was a major pain.  Inevitably I gradually lowered the settings to see how much my system could handle where I could play the game comfortably.  I’ve lowered the resolution to 720P, textures to low, anti-aliasing off, and graphics details to low.

Overall, I’m a bit disappointed in how poorly my system handles games, but at the same time I’m not surprised.  Nowhere has atom/ion been advertised as a gaming processor.  So I still say my system does well in what it was intended to do, which was be my HTPC.  It functions perfectly running Windows Media Center, and I can still game at low settings if I choose.

Still, I might have my family inherit this computer once I start my next build sometime next year.  I’m looking to go Quad Core i7 this time around.

I’m loving it!  Fired up my HTPC for the first time, so far I have already installed Windows 7, the hardware drivers, and some updates, now to get it all setup for playing movies.

This is a thing of beauty.  The performance is amazing, and it makes almost no sound at all.  I can’t wait to test out it’s gaming capabilities even though that’s not going to be a major focus of this build.  Mostly I’m going to use this for HD playback.

Once I get everything setup I’ll post pictures of the build and specifics on the hardware and software.