TL;DR
- Google has announced that affordable Google-powered TVs with “low RAM” are in the works.
- This comes a while after we first heard that Android TV now requires 1GB of RAM instead of 1.5GB.
- We hope these TVs still offer a pleasant experience, as cheap Android TV and Google TV devices are more prone to performance issues.
You don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for a smart TV running the Android TV or Google TV platforms, but non-smart TVs are still significantly cheaper. Now, Google has announced that smart TVs with reduced RAM are coming.
Shobana Radhakrishnan, Google’s senior director of engineering for TV, confirmed in a YouTube video that “low RAM Google TVs” are on the way:
We’ll be partnering with select OEMs to launch affordable and reliable low RAM panel TVs, allowing more budget-conscious users to experience quality entertainment.
This seems like a double-edged sword for the platform. On the one hand, this means that many more people should be able to buy TVs with the Google TV platform, potentially bridging the gap between smart and non-smart TVs. This would also reduce the need for a separate TV stick/box purchase. On the other hand, one of the biggest complaints about cheap Android TV devices like the old Xiaomi Mi TV Stick is that performance can be an issue. This is largely due to the small amount of storage and limited RAM.
Do you have performance issues on your cheap Google TV device?
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There’s no word on the amount of RAM in these new affordable Google TV sets. However, we previously reported that Android TV now requires a minimum of 1GB of RAM (down from 1.5GB), while Google TV’s minimum was set at 2GB. It’s worth noting that there are already Google TV-powered television sets and TV boxes with 1.5GB and 2GB of RAM, suggesting that these new affordable TVs could have 1GB of RAM.
In any event, we hope Google has optimized the Google TV OS to run smoothly on these devices. We also hope the company has enlisted the help of major streaming app developers to improve their apps on these devices. After all, what’s the point of a cheaper smart TV if Prime Video and Netflix struggle to run on it?
