Chromecast does not directly play the local media on your phone/tablet (yet)

There is a common misconception that chromecast can display the content that you have on your tablet or phone. Google made it look so seamless that people think so. It cannot display the media (photos, video) in your phone or tablet. But don't get disheartened yet, there are some hacks to work around the limitation.

The basic thing to understand is that when you choose to play a video (youtube, netflix), your phone/tablet will share the URL with the chromecast device. Chromecast will connect to your wifi router directly and get the content from the internet. There is more than this to make to look seamless. You can control the playback of the video from your device. To achieve this all your device has to do is to share the playback control information to the chromecast device and it will apply those controls on the content that it got from the web.

I think there is a good reason behind this. If it has to playback the media directly from your personal device, your personal device should have very good bandwidth capabilities to have a good video quality. Good video quality is important because the display will be on a large screen. Not all personal devices have this good bandwidth to stream local media.

I am guessing that google wants to give a good first-time-experience albeit with limited functionality. I think there will be a big demand from the users to be able to play the media on their phone/tablet. They may be willing to loose some video quality. Google may bring this feature down the line.

Voice search app for iphone from google

Before going into the details of the application, it will be interesting to know some funny things that happened with it. Google launched the application on Friday, 14-Nov-2008. But the application did not appear in the apple store even on monday. Apple forgot to add the application to their app store. There are also reports that the delay is because of the apple's strict review process. But this should definitely have been coordinated better for the launch.

Talking about the application, as is obvious from the name, it searches the web based on voice commands. No need to type into those tiny keyboard offered by mobile phones. Just ask the question. Added to this, the application exploits the GPS in the phone to provide location based services. So, you can ask "Where is the nearest Starbucks coffee shop?". Interesting, isn't it ? The results that you get are text results but optimized for mobile phone display. The phone numbers etc stand out explicitly so that you can use them to dail out.

As with other google products, this application is also free. The initial hands-on reports on this application says that the application is awesome and accurate. Accurate both in terms of recognizing the voice and the results. This application cannot be used for any other phone functions like dailing your contacts etc. This application is purely meant for search.