My Chromecast finally showed up last Tuesday, more than a week after Google said it would ship. I ordered it the same afternoon it was announced, back on the 24th, along with what felt like every other person who reads tech blogs, and by that evening it was sold out everywhere - Amazon, Best Buy, the Google Play store itself. Thirty five bucks for a little black dongle that plugs into an HDMI port. Cheap enough that I didn't think twice about ordering it sight unseen, which in hindsight is exactly the point of pricing it that low.
Setup is genuinely easy, I'll give them that. Plug it into the HDMI port, plug the USB cable into either the TV (if it has a powered USB port, mine doesn't) or the included wall adapter, download the Chromecast app on your phone or laptop, and it walks you through connecting to your wifi. Took maybe four minutes total, including the part where I had to dig out the little HDMI extender cable because my TV's HDMI ports are recessed behind the bezel and the dongle itself is too fat to sit flush against the back of the set. Small annoying detail, easy fix, but the kind of thing that makes you wonder if anyone at Google actually tested this on a real television bought at a real Best Buy.
Once it's set up, here's what you can actually do with it as of this week: cast Netflix, cast YouTube, cast Google Play Movies and TV, and cast a tab from Chrome on your laptop if you install the extension. That's it. That's the whole list. No Hulu Plus, no HBO Go, no Spotify, none of the stuff people were assuming would just show up because "its Google, they'll add it fast." Maybe they will eventually. Right now it's a Netflix and YouTube box that happens to also throw your browser tab onto the TV in a pinch.
And the tab-casting part, I want to be honest, is rough. It's in beta and it feels like it. I tried casting a YouTube video from a browser tab instead of using the native YouTube casting, just to test it, and the audio lagged behind the video by maybe half a second, enough to be distracting within a minute. My four year old laptop's fan spun up like it was rendering a Pixar movie just to mirror a browser tab to a TV eight feet away. If you've got a newer machine it's probably fine. Mine is not a newer machine. I wouldn't buy this thing for the tab casting alone, not yet.
The Netflix and YouTube casting, on the other hand, is the best part of the whole setup and it's not close. You pull up a show on your phone, tap the little cast icon, and the TV just starts playing it while your phone becomes a remote. Your phone can go to sleep, you can close the app entirely, and the show keeps playing on the TV without you. That part feels like a small bit of magic in a way that streaming boxes usually don't manage. My Roku, which has been collecting dust under the TV for two years because I never bothered learning its remote, is probably going in a drawer now.
Worth saying plainly: this thing is not a replacement for a Roku or an Apple TV if you actually use a lot of apps, at least not yet. It's a thirty five dollar bet that Google keeps adding app support over the next few months, and given how fast they moved on Android in the early days, I'd guess that bet pays off eventually. But if you buy one this week expecting it to do everything your Roku already does, you'll be annoyed by Friday. Buy it for Netflix and YouTube on the cheap, and treat everything else as a bonus that might show up later.
One more small complaint since I'm already in complaining mode: the little cast icon that shows up inside supported apps is easy to miss the first few times. I spent a good ten minutes on day one convinced my unit was defective before I noticed the tiny icon sitting in the corner of the YouTube app, maybe a quarter the size of everything else on the screen. Not a huge deal. Just annoying enough that I nearly emailed Google support over nothing.
If you can actually find one in stock right now, and that's a real if given how fast the first batch sold out, it's worth the thirty five dollars for the Netflix and YouTube casting by itself. Everything else on top of that is a maybe, and I'd hold off on getting excited about the tab casting until they get the sync issues sorted out.