Ok, this post isn’t design related, but I wanted to share this with you. The “idea” isn’t a new one. I remember Internet-TV connections a while back. Google TV seems a bit different, though. It certainly caught my eye, and may very well end up in my living room one day.

Google TV. It’s like a pizza rolled inside a burrito. Decadent, non-stop entertainment that brings together the web and the TV in the most seamless way possible yet. Announced in May, Google TV is now a consumer reality, with Sony shipping its internet-powered televisions, Google’s software included. As well as a couple of boxes by Sony and Logitech that allow you to add Google TV to an existing television. So things are now right in the world: You can watch YouTube clips of cats playing the piano in full HD. This past August, Google TV introduced the icon for its service.

Like the rest of Google’s brands — Chrome, Wave (RIP), Gmail — the Google TV logo lacks sophistication and implements with stubborn consistency its four corporate colors, blue, red, green, and yellow. Internetgod bless them for it. But the results are always disappointing with logos that end up looking like things that would sit best in kids’ toy packaging. One of the most perplexing things about the new icon is that, um, it has rabbit ears. Sure, we see rabbit ears and think TV. But didn’t we do away with rabbit ears right about the time when cell phones stopped being the size of Shaq’s shoe? If Google TV represents the future of TV, its icon represents the past. Inside granny’s TV sit nine 16:9 rectangles which allude to the new TV standard size and they do manage to convey that all kinds of things happen inside the TV.

The one thing that did make me smile about the logo, well, not the logo itself, but it’s application, is that when you roll over it at Google TV’s website the little boxes come alive and pop out of the box. Perhaps a clue that Google TV 3D is next!

Related articles

• Google TV: Hands On with Sony Blu Ray (ryanspoon.com)
• With Google TV, I May Never Leave The Sofa Again (techcrunch.com)
• The big three networks have all blocked Google TV (geek.com)