Lenovo launches first Ice Cream Sandwich TV →
This is just a weird story: it’s not running Google TV, it’s running Android 4.0, and it’s designed to “access Lenovo’s yet-to-be-launched cloud services to stream personal media stored in the cloud.” All of the complaints one might have about Gene Munster’s Unicorn, the Apple smart television, are present here—namely, that we still haven’t been shown anything that you can do with a “smart TV” that you can’t do by buying whatever television you want and a $99 Apple TV or Roku, other than cut down on a couple cables. The one thing Lenovo definitely can’t bring? Access to the iTunes ecosystem. While I bet it will have Netflix, everybody has Netflix. If they strike a deal with Amazon, they’ll have something—although I don’t know whether that’s really enough to make somebody buy a new TV.
(“It’s unclear whether it will have access to the Android Market,” GigaOM writes. Well, of course it will, to get access to all those existing Android apps designed to be run with a TV control instead of a touch screen.)
