[Google Chromecast] TabGuy:
It's been almost 3 weeks since I purchased 4 Chromecasts. I have some Pros and Cons about my experience. I encourage you to add your own Pro/Con list.

Pros:

- Cheap. At $35 it's an impulse buy. I expect to see it at the checkout aisle of the supermarket next to the gift cards.

- Cheap will make it ubiquitous. Every app developer will rush to make their app Chromecastable.

- Extremely easy to set up. Some have had troubles as we've seen on this forum but my daughter set hers up without a single phone call to me. And she has absolutely no tech skills.

- I absolutely, positively love the ability to queue YouTube videos. I wish Netflix had that and I hope other app developers pick up on that. I wish there was one central queue where I could queue up Netflix, YouTube, Google Music, et all in one big queue. I could plan a whole night's viewing and then just sit back and watch.

- Shared control. It's nice that I can start a video and leave the room and my wife can take over control of it on her device. Very clever.

- Doesn't tie up my device. I can do other things while watching a video. Multitasking as it were.

- I can start a video on my phone then cast it to my family room TV, then pause it and start playing it on my bedroom PC, then pause it and finish it on my tablet. Very versitile.

- Video quality is superb. 1080p is very nice from the Chromecast. As good as cable TV.

- Audio is also superb. 5.1 is a nice surprise.

- If you have multiple wifi routers with multiple SSIDs you can control a Chromecast across SSIDs. And you see all the Chromecasts no matter which SSID you're currently using.

CONS

- Using the phone/tablet as a remote is not as convenient as a real remote. We have an unwritten rule in our house that when someone starts a conversation we pause the TV. With a real remote I can do this in a split second without looking at the remote. Using Chromecast I can't. Not only do I have to look at the phone, thus ignoring the person that is talking to me, I have to find the app that cast the video and start it up again to be able to pause it. This has made for an awkward situation more than once.

- It's not a perfect device, lots of app tweaking needs to be done.

- Sometimes I get spinning circle on my phone and it never casts.

- Sometimes I get spinning circle on my phone but the cast actually starts. This is not good at all as I have no way of pausing or stopping it from my phone. Same thing happens to my tablet so it's not a device specific issue.

- There's no ability to reduce picture quality. If I'm in a hotel using my phone's hot spot capability I could easily eat up 5gb of data watching a 1080p movie when 480p, or even less, would have been satisfactory.

- It has connectivity issues with some routers, especially Verizon FIOS' Actiontec router. There's not much in the way of documentation to help with this. The help information refers to turning off a feature that the router doesn't have.

BOTTOM LINE

The Chromecast is not a perfect device, like all devices, but the low cost and ease use make up for a lot of its misgivings. Almost all of the Cons I have listed can be corrected by software updates. I only see this product as getting better and better. The only fear is that it becomes another Google castoff like Google TV or Google Reader or Google Q or Buzz. But at $35 there's not much risk.

This product is a sign of the future and the future is bright. With many devices battling for this space, Apple TV, Roku, etc. we will all be the winners. Just as many people have multiple game consoles so will many people have multiple streaming devices. This is going to be a fun ride.