The pedestal is also kind of a pain to assemble, with little help from the tiny diagrams in TCL’s otherwise decent setup guide. There are eight small screws used to connect the riser to the base, four more to attach it to the TV, and a bit of confusion over which of 10 mounting holes you’re meant to use.
These are hardly dealbreakers. If you’re planning to wall-mount the TV, the base becomes a non-issue. Same if you’re skipping a soundbar altogether. Or maybe you’re willing to live with it sitting out in front a few inches.
Setting up the TV itself is largely a breeze, especially if you already have the Google Home app on your phone. Even though I’m an iPhone guy, I was able to scan an onscreen QR code and use the app to move quickly through the setup process. An account sign-in and Wi-Fi network selection later, I just had to wait on a software update before heading to the couch.
Photograph: Rick Broida
Photograph: Rick Broida
TCL’s unremarkable remote has sharp edges, the usual mishmash of Google TV buttons, and a pretty disorganized layout overall. On the plus side, it’s backlit and comes with six app-shortcut buttons.
One head-scratcher: The penultimate TV-setup screen notes that I can “customize the star button on the remote,” using it as a shortcut for this or that, which sounds great except that there is no star button.
Gemini Comes to Google TV
Speaking of hallucinations (kidding!), Google Gemini comes baked into the Google TV UI, which is reasonably easy to navigate but not without a few annoyances. For example, the top menu includes a Live TV page—home to various FAST channels, simple enough—but also a TCL page that contains … other FAST channels.
As for Gemini, it’s nice to have but hardly essential. Just talk into the remote and you can ask for, say, movies about sharks, or learn who invented the Steadicam. The voice recognition is responsive, and the responses arrive quickly. Too bad it’s not hands-free; you have to press and hold a button on the remote to use it. Gemini also dishes up “watch now” options, and you can use it to create custom images and video clips, if you want. Unfortunately, while Gemini can accommodate basic TV commands (“Start Netflix,” “Mute the sound,” etc.), it can’t do things like open picture settings or toggling off motion-smoothing—a bummer because those commands would actually save you a little time. Instead, such requests turn into basic web searches, returning only information on how to access those settings yourself.