Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• Work media tools in 2012 and beyond

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis

The solar cells are on the outside of the cover, so they’re not in your way when using the wireless keyboard. When using the folio to prop up an iPad at one of two angles, the cells face outward to capture any available light. The bottom keyboard row of the Solar Keyboard Folio works as dedicated music and volume control keys when used in a specific angle for media consumption.

Logitech is taking pre-orders now for the $129.99 setup, which isn’t too bad when you factor in the convenience of never buying or replacing any batteries for it. The product works with either the iPad 2 or the new iPad and features the same instant off/on as Apple’s own iPad cover. The two-year battery life claim is based on two hours of daily use, so if you’re an all-day typer on the iPad, you’ll surely see the battery run down faster. Unless you live in a cloud-free region near the Equator, that is.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

I’ve never even entertained the thought of a keyboard accessory for my iPad, mainly because I don’t type long prose on it, but given the look and functionality the Ultrathin Keyboard Cover provides, I’m tempted to get one. I’d likely use the iPad more often as a result.

Aside from the Apple look-and-feel, Logitech made good use of the iPad’s internal magnets. Closing the case puts your iPad to sleep and of course, opening the case will wake your tablet. Magnetic hinges, similar to those on Apple’s own Smart Cover, keep the iPad attached to the case. For keyboard use, you simply place the iPad in a slotted grove above the keyboard’s top row of keys: A simple but elegant looking solution.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Bluetooth to Feel Blue as Personal Area Network Battles Loom
• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

Google and its partners have never said how many Google TV devices were bought by consumers since the platform’s debut, but the company said in the past that device activations have doubled since the  Google TV 2.0 software update late last year. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on any numbers for this story. However, there are some very useful clues hidden within Google’s Android Market statistics: Google publishes ballpark numbers about each and every app’s active install base — the number of devices an app is installed on right now — as part of its Market app pages.

Google TV comes with a number of pre-installed apps, which are also listed on the Android Market. One example of this is the TV and Movies app, which is basically Google TV’s programming guide — an essential part of the Google TV experience that most users wouldn’t dare to delete from their machines. The active install base for this app, according to Google’s Android Market, currently is 500,000 to 1 million. The same is true for all the other apps that come pre-installed with Google TV, which suggests that the number of Google TV devices that are currently being used by consumers is less than 1 million.

This data is supported by findings from Xyologic, which recently estimated that the install base for various preinstalled apps ranges from around 600,000 to 900,000 devices. I asked Xyologic co-founder Matthäus Krzykowski how the company gathers its data, and he told me that it estimates the install base of apps based on a number of data points, and usually only sees error margins of a few percentage points.

It’s worth pointing out that the number of active devices doesn’t necessarily translate into sales numbers. People could have bought Google TV devices and never turned them on. Devices that haven’t received the Google TV 2.0 update, which was rolled out last fall, also aren’t part of any Android Market data.

Data shared by developers shows that Logitech's Revue makes up for up to 70 percent of all Google TV devices. The other two entries shown in the chart represent Sony Blu-ray players and TVs.

Still, Android Market data does offer some interesting insights into Google TV’s usage. App developers can, for example, see on their internal Market dashboard which devices their apps are installed on. I asked a few developers to share these data points with me, and the results show that Logitech’s Google TV fire sale apparently worked: the Logitech Revue set-top box accounts for 50 to 70 percent of all Google TV devices used to install various third-party apps, depending on who you ask.

That’s actually good news for Google, which is about to roll out a second generation of devices with CE partners like Vizio, Sony and LG. The new devices are based on ARM chips as opposed to Intel, which should bring the price down considerably. Logitech ended up selling its Revue set-top box for $99, which may just be the pricing sweet spot for a Google TV box.

Still, the numbers clearly show that Google has some work to do. Even if you take into account that active devices don’t equal sold devices, it’s obvious that others have been doing far better. Apple has sold 4.2 million Apple TV units, and Roku — despite missing its own sales goals — was able to sell 2.5 million boxes by the end of last year.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• Report: The Connected TV Marketplace

A mistake of implementation

While admitting that the Logitech Google TV was a mistake, De Luca was clear it wasn’t a mistake of intention or strategy, but one of implementation. In his comments, De Luca reiterated the belief that “Google TV or a child of Google TV or the grandchild of Google TV will happen,” and that “the integration of television and Internet is inevitable.” In other words, it wasn’t a question of whether or not the convergence of TV and the Internet will come to be, but how soon it would occur.

“The idea that it would happen overnight in Christmas 2010 was very misguided and that also cost us dearly,” he said.

Of course, Logitech isn’t the only company to suffer from being ahead of its time on a certain product or strategic initiative. Just think of Apple’s Newton tablet or the tablet PCs that Microsoft showed off long before the iPad changed the computing industry. Heck, the Logitech Revue and the first iteration of Google TV are far from the first failed efforts at interactive television: Fifteen years ago, WebTV launched to bring the Internet to TV.

For Logitech, the expectation that consumers were finally ready for this brand new experience was misguided. “It’s always the case people will tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term,” De Luca said

Google TV not complete at launch

It’s not just that the timing wasn’t right, but also that the Google TV software wasn’t quite ready for primetime. De Luca stopped short of calling the initial Google TV operating system “beta software,” but acknowledged that it wasn’t complete and not “tuned to what the consumers want at the living room.”

One big failure was the way in which users interacted with the Google TV interface: a problem that wasn’t helped by the clunky input devices that CE manufacturers offered with products that supported the TV OS. In Logitech’s case, that was shipping the Revue with a keyboard and trackpad that made navigating the TV tricky. And Sony, which had its own line of Google TV products, shipped with a monstrosity of a remote that was more confusing than useful.

But the Internet-enabled content also wasn’t there at launch. While the introduction of a Flash-enabled web browser built into Google TV initially gave some users hope that they’d now be able to watch all the same online video content on their TV that they enjoyed on the desktop, the reality was that premium content owners quickly moved to block access to their videos on the device.

The price wasn’t right

Finally, Logitech overestimated the price consumers would be willing to pay for the Google TV experience. It wasn’t alone in this regard; Sony TV and Blu-ray units with Google TV were priced at a premium as well. However, asking consumers to pay $300 for an Internet-enabled set-top box when Apple TV and Roku sold for $99 was a non-starter. DeLuca said that heavily discounted units are selling now, but they’re also selling at a loss: Logitech’s cost of materials for the Revue is well above the $99 that it’s now asking for the device.

With a $100 million loss attributed mostly to its mistake with Google TV, Logitech is in no position to double down on the platform. While it hasn’t given up on supporting future versions of Google TV, De Luca said he’s optimistic that the operating system will catch on, but isn’t willing to bet the company on it. For now, that means running out inventory on its existing box and taking a wait-and-see approach going forward.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room

While the market for TV apps is incredibly fragmented, it doesn’t appear that Adobe’s Flash will provide a solution. The company confirmed through a statement that like mobile, it will no longer focus on porting the Flash plugin into web browsers on CE devices, but believes developers should build native apps on those devices instead. An Adobe spokesperson writes:

“Adobe will continue to support existing licensees who are planning on supporting Flash Player for web browsing on digital home devices and are using the Flash Player Porting Kit to do so. However we believe the right approach to deliver content on televisions is through applications, not a web browsing experience, and we will continue to encourage the device and content publishing community down that path.”

Adobe’s efforts to bring Flash to connected TVs, Blu-ray players and other devices, like its mobile Flash plans, were part of its Open Screen Project, which aimed to create a consistent app runtime across multiple devices. The idea was that developers would be able to create a Flash application once and be able to distribute it across web browsers, mobile devices and TVs.

Two-and-a-half years ago, Adobe announced a number of partnerships with OEMs and system-on-chip vendors such as Broadcom, Intel, STMicroelectronics, NXP Semiconductors and Sigma Designs to embed the Flash player into their silicon. But the number of TVs and other CE devices that support the Flash player have been limited to those from Sony and Logitech running the Google TV operating system. And Google TV has hardly been a success.

Now, Adobe is taking a step back from those plans, but not abandoning the TV app segment altogether. Instead of pushing multi-screen, browser-based Flash applications, Adobe is hoping to convince developers to create native apps on mobile and TV devices using the Adobe AIR framework. Already some developers are taking advantage of that framework, with publishers like Cnet, Epix and YouTube building TV apps for Samsung TVs based on Adobe AIR.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• Report: The Connected TV Marketplace

Google TV VP of Product Mario Queiroz and Google TV Product Lead Rishi Chandra sat down with me the other day to talk strategy as well as give me a tour of the new platform. Check out a first video of Google TV below, or skip down to read about the major updates and many more things to come.

Lessons learned

Saying that Google TV hasn’t been a success story is being very polite. The platform was mostly met with bad reviews when it first came out a year ago, and sales were so lackluster that hardware partner Logitech lost millions of dollars as well as its CEO, and eventually decided to drop the price of its Revue set-top box from $249 to $99.

That’s been a humbling experience for the Google TV team, and both Queiroz and Chandra went out of their way to point out that they got the message. “We learned a lot from V1,” Queiroz told me. He said the team completely understood that the first version was too complex, and too much focused on the things that Google knows best, like search.

Queiroz described this update as the first step towards making Google TV more user-friendly – with a big emphasis on first step. “This is not the final version,” he promised, adding that there will be “one or two major OS updates a year” going forward.

Features added

That being said, the new version offers a lot of improvements. Here are some of the most notable new features:

• Access to the Android Market is easily the biggest step for Google TV. Queiroz told me that the total number of compatible apps available will be around 1600 to 1800 at launch, but that will include many mobile apps that may just have been tweaked a little to also run on the TV screen. There will be 30 to 50 featured apps optimized for Google TV, including the following: QVC for Google TV, AOL HD, Fox News, Wall Street Journal Live, Pandora, Clicker and Twitter. (Check out the entire list of featured apps here.)
• The UI was simplified as well and now works better as an overlay over TV programming, which should make the integration with pay TV services easier — more on that below.
• Google TV now has a simplified programming guide in the form of a TV and movies app that offers access to live TV listings as well as online sources for content. There’s an option to get personalized recommendations based on past ratings and viewing behaviour, but it’s opt-in.
• Users will be able to install non-market apps, which should make a lot of developers and homebrew hackers very, very happy.
• YouTube is playing a much bigger role in this version of Google TV. The first iteration included a somewhat awkward YouTube integration that threw users back onto the video sharing website, but YouTube became nonetheless the most popular app on Google TV. Google TV 2.0 includes a proper YouTube for TV interface, and videos start in full-screen mode right away.

What does the future have in store?

The new version of Google TV isn’t really all that groundbreaking; rather, it’s what Google TV should have offered all along. And that seems to be exactly what Google was aiming for with this release — not a big flash, but finally a solid base that can be continuously improved both through Google’s apps as well as applications from third-party developers.

Queiroz and Chandra didn’t share many details about future releases, but they said that social will play a significant role for Google TV in the future — which of course can only mean that Google+ will inevitably find its way to Google TV sooner or later.

Part of that continuous push will also be the release of new devices. Both Samsung and Vizio have already announced their own Google TV devices, and the company is now saying that it will have more partners to announce in 2012. Those devices will be cheaper too, now that Intel has ceeded the smart TV game to ARM.

Queiroz also hinted at two other big opportunities for Google TV: The platform will eventually be available outside the U.S., and he admitted that the television market works very differently once you leave this country. To me, that sounded like a hint that Google may be more open to embracing free over-the-air content in Europe and other places where pay TV doesn’t play as big of a role as in the U.S. He also said that even in the U.S., there would be other distribution models. Given that Google just acquired Motorola Mobility, one can expect that Google is already looking at bringing Google TV to cable TV set-top boxes.

Cable boxes, Google+ integration, additional hardware partnerships: Google is definitely looking at Google TV as a long-term bet. That’s why Queiroz and Chandra didn’t even pretend that the new version will magically turn everything around and transform Google TV into an overnight success story. But it will give them a more solid basis to work on, and possibly evolve into something that could play a major role in years to come. Said Queiroz: “We very much believe that the ecosystem will take off.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• The coming living room OS war
• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry

To be fair, Apple won’t be first in bringing voice-controlled TV apps to market: Google TV’s remote app allowed voice controls more than a year ago, and the next update to Microsoft’s Xbox Live will include Kinect-enabled voice controls when it goes live in late November. But Apple’s introduction of Siri as an integrated part of the user interface could take the concept well beyond how we’ve come to think of voice control to this point.

If Siri does emerge as an integral part of the Apple iTV, it won’t be the first time Apple changed media consumption through the input device. The company also revolutionized the way people interact with content with the introduction of the touch screen on the first iPhone. While it might not have been readily apparent at the time, the ability to control iTunes — and later Apple TV — with the iPhone Remote app was the first step in changing the way people controlled media.

More remote apps have since followed, some of which worked directly with devices already in people’s homes and some of which use bridging technologies to do so. Service providers like Comcast and AT&T have introduced apps that connect with their proprietary set-top boxes, allowing people to search and browse channels, and set and update their DVRs through an easy-to-use touch interface. App makers like Peel, Dijit and Logitech have extended that model to create universal remotes that integrate with IR blasters to control all the devices in one home.

With the introduction of Siri, it seems the touchscreen control could soon be replaced by voice controls throughout the Apple ecosystem. But consumer adoption voice control for an iTV or other Apple device is just one step toward a voice-controlled future for all sorts of other devices.

That will enable applications like whole-home automation — the ability to set heat, A/C and light controls — controlled by voice through a unified system. And with persistent connectivity of all these devices — the so-called “Internet of things” — users will be able to speak controls remotely into a phone or other device and have them carried across the network before being implemented in other locations.

This is all very Jetsons-type stuff, the kind of “they promised us jetpacks” future we’ve all been waiting decades for. And we’re finally on the cusp of realizing it. All of which is to say that while asking Siri to perform outrageous tasks and seeing what her response is seems like a novel joke today, someday soon it might not be so unusual to order her to bake you a pie and actually have it defrosted and ready made in the oven when you return from work.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration