Streaming devices made by the likes of Roku, Apple, and Amazon have a lot to gain from hardware updates, since they process their audio and video internally, and sometimes come with distinctly new remotes or game controllers. Something like the Google Chromecast, on the other hand, is a little harder to go update-crazy about.

The major selling point of Google's $35 HDMI dongle is to repeat the audio and video signal from the mobile device you already own, to make content from your smartphone, tablet, or laptop pop up conveniently and wirelessly on your bigger TV screen. Thus, it isn't paired with stuff like new controllers, and while Chromecast does also process some content internally, the device has never been advertised with major hardware features such as graphic acceleration. Thus, until the dongle's core mission statement changes, a new version of Chromecast exists mostly to do the same thing as the last one, right?

That's not to say the two-year-old dongle didn't need a little sprucing, and as such this year's model feels like a stealth, catch-up upgrade, as opposed to a streaming-dongle sea-changer. The 2015 Chromecast has received a hardware redesign and some antenna tweakage; it now shares shelf space with an all-new Chromecast Audio dongle; and its new app, at least on Android, aspires to be a one-stop shop for all of your streaming-video content. Let's find out what difference two years makes.

The 2015 Chromecast: Hope you like the color "lemonade"

Sam Machkovech







Sam Machkovech



Sam Machkovech





Sam Machkovech



If you've grown bored of the usual pack-of-gum design of most streaming-device dongles—or, more crucially, if that design doesn't fit so well behind your wall-mounted TV or alongside your entertainment center's slew of HDMI cords—then the 2015 Chromecast is here to save your day. The round, thin dongle, about the size of a York Peppermint Patty, connects to a screen by way of a nearly three-inch HDMI cord.

That cord is wide, thin, and sturdy, and its tip is magnetized, which means the unit folds up neatly when not in use. However, that magnet isn't powerful enough to attract the Chromecast through the plastic of a TV set, meaning the main unit dangles a little messily. Like most other streaming sticks, the new Chromecast requires power by way of a micro-USB cable, and like the others, your TV set's USB port will suffice, should it have one.









































Plug that bad boy into your screen of choice, and after a 20-second power-up, you'll see a message asking you to download the Chromecast app for either iOS or Android. During the app's setup, your 2015 Chromecast will act as a Wi-Fi router, and your mobile device will identify it pretty quickly to start the handshake process, at which point you'll be asked to give your new Chromecast a name and tell it your preferred Wi-Fi router's password.

Users also get the option to turn on "guest mode"—which "allows devices in the same room to cast without being on your Wi-Fi network." This has been advertised as a two-part confirmation system: part one asks users to connect to the Chromecast's personal Wi-Fi broadcast, which is turned on temporarily when a guest uses the app and hunts for a guest-enabled dongle, and part two sends a PIN code by way of audio chirps from the Chromecast to the guest's device. We couldn't see how the chirping worked, however, because we couldn't get the Chromecast to serve up its own Wi-Fi signal to guest devices.

Honestly, even if we got this working, we'd probably just disable this option and tell our cast-happy friends our Wi-Fi password—though, again, like the last Chromecast, simply knowing the Wi-Fi password is enough for a user to start casting. Google still offers no password options or other security measures to block your more annoying friends from interrupting your cast and instead immediately casting really, really disgusting tabs from their laptop's Chrome browser.

At its best, the 2015 Chromecast accepted our smartphone, tablet, and laptop casts with incredible ease—and in the case of apps and supported websites, this means the content is passed off by way of a link so that the Chromecast can do the heavy lifting, as opposed to draining your portable device's battery to stream. We had one of each device laid on our couch and did a lot of cast-hoppin': Netflix flung from an iPad, Hulu served by a Nexus 6, and YouTube clips streaming through Chrome's Chromecast plug-in.

For the most part, that's the same experience that owners of the original 2013 device can enjoy, but this year's model comes packed with more antennas and 5GHz wireless support. This means Chromecasters in crowded apartment buildings or with other wireless connectivity issues can expect better performance. Our far-from-scientific test involved casting from mobile devices after we'd placed them in notoriously poor spots in our apartment, and we noticed a teensy bit of stutter, but certainly forgivable stuff.

What we didn't see was any recognizable boost as a result of the 2015 Chromecast's advertised "Fast Play" mode, which is meant to guess what you'll watch next and pre-fetch content accordingly. That's because Fast Play capabilities haven't been made available for app developers; we'll have to wait until 2016 to see whether such pre-fetching options will make a significant difference for real-world binge-watching.

We're not sure whether the Fast Play functionality will boost the newer Chromecast's visual quality in any way, but when we flipped back and forth between an Xbox One, a Vizio TV's native apps, and Chromecast feeds on both the Netflix and Hulu apps, the 2015 Chromecast consistently fell behind in terms of resolution and fidelity.

Games and apps

If you and your friends connect your own devices to the same Chromecast while flipping through YouTube, you can all add content to the TV's playlist queue. This was a key complaint in our 2013 review; that kind of party-friendly appeal may not convince you to buy a Chromecast over any other device, but once you have the option, it's a fun one to toy around with. (Unfortunately, other Google apps, such as Google Play Music, do not support such party-shared queue options.)

An even bigger complaint from two years ago was how few apps played nice with Chromecast, a fact that has since soundly changed on both Android and iOS. "Thousands" of apps are compatible, they say—and we're pretty sure at least a few hundred of those are garbage—but the point is that pretty much every worthwhile media app out there is compatible with Chromecast. That being said, acceptable performance isn't universal; heavies like YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu run smoothly on the 2015 Chromecast with very brief buffering periods, but we ran into some bugs and audio sync issues on apps like Comedy Central.

Nobody will be shocked to learn that Apple's native iOS multimedia apps—iTunes and the like—still don't support Chromecasting, and it doesn't seem as though Amazon is interested in putting Instant Video content on the Chromecast either. In the case of Amazon Instant Video, there's at least the janky option of casting a Google Chrome video tab or mirroring your Android device's screen while it's running Amazon Video, but if you're looped into one of the two incompatible video marketplaces, don't kid yourself; you'll wanna stick with officially supported devices in either of those cases.







We've previously talked at Ars about the promise of two-screen gaming, though mostly in the form of the botched beta of Xfinity Gaming, which forced people to use a Comcast TV box and an iOS device. In that case, the Comcast box streamed a video game from the cloud, and then players had to use an iOS or Samsung device to load a game controller within a Web browser. In short, it was clunky, both in getting games started and in running them smoothly.

In the time since we first reviewed Chromecast, meanwhile, Google's dongle has gotten a small slew of compatible games that can be played using iOS and Android phones as controllers. The new Chromecast hasn't been advertised with any particularly game-friendly boosts, beyond possibly having fewer dropped connections with that 5 GHz Wi-Fi signal, and we didn't notice anything too crazy when testing a few of the dinky Chromecast-compatible games on the Google Play store.

Just Dance Now still lets players play a serviceable version of the dance game while holding their phone, a practice that we find awkward at best and crap-I-dropped-my-phone-doing-the-Macarena at worst, Scrabble Blitz still lets friends manage letter tiles on their own screens and, er, play a much inferior Boggle-style "twist" on the original Scrabble. (Why Hasbro hasn't bothered making a full Chromecast-compatible version of Scrabble—or even Boggle—is beyond us.) We'll have to wait and see whether Chromecast-enabled versions of Angry Birds Go (which promises live split-screen racing multiplayer) and WGT Golf (which will turn your touchscreen into a Golden Tee-style control pad) fulfill more of the platform's promise. For now, the lack of compelling Chromecast games seems like real chicken-or-egg stuff.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech