Month: May 2014

Chromecast and its Achilles’ heel

I returned my Chromecast. I played with it for about a week but I found its Achilles’ heel the moment I casted my first video. This is how it happened.

I have a secondary TV where I wanted to be able to watch Hulu and other media channels without spending too much money. After some investigation, I found that one of the cheapest solutions was Chromecast, at only $35.

Two features in particular caught my attention: Chromecast is a small dongle that connects to the HDMI port of any TV, and any device with Android, iOS or Windows can be used to stream a video to your TV. Since I normally stream videos to my Xbox 360 using my Dell Venue 8 Pro (the Play feature included in Windows 8.1 is awesome), I thought it would be very convenient to do a similar thing with Chrome and its Google Cast extension. I didn’t need anything else!

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The curious case of the expanding smartphone

It all started like this: mobile phones were big, heavy and difficult to hold. Fortunately, my first mobile phone was a Motorola that looked a lot like this one and it was small enough to fit in my pocket; however I still remember how uncomfortable was to walk with it given its bulky antenna and thick body.

As time passed by, mobile phones got smaller, lighter and more powerful. Any phone today is more powerful than the computer that brought us to the Moon. It felt like the microscopic mobile phone was closer than ever. That was the dream, those were the good times.

Then the world went crazy… and this happened:

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