New Nexus Gear

In the last few days I've got myself some new (at least to me) Nexus gear. What comes to my Nexus 5 with the broken screen, I didn't end up shelling 150€ for replacing the screen but bought a secondhand Nexus 5 for 160€ instead. Granted there's the downside that the replacement N5 has only 16GB of storage while my old one had 32GB, but I think I can live with that since I can bring also the old one along if I need to carry e.g. some extra movies. This option also gave me a backup/testing device as the old one is still usable despite the cracked screen. I'm planning to install the Android M preview on it to check if I can replicate the reports I've read about quite impressive battery life gains.

The other newcomer is a Nexus Player. As you might have noticed, Google recently updated the YouTube Data API, which in turn broke several YouTube clients. My 2nd generation Apple TV was among the affected devices and it's become quite obvious that it won't be getting an update (the 3rd generation one did, however). As also WWDC went by without the rumored Apple TV update, I decided to stop waiting and get myself something I could watch YouTube on and possibly also get a native Plex app so that I could dump my PlexConnect hack.

After I got my Nexus Player up and running I could see that decent YouTube experience was back (I do have also a Chromecast, but my wife wasn't too fond of the idea of having to use her phone for controlling the thing), but the Plex experience was a step or two back compared to PlexConnect even though I was running an official Plex app now. The app looks OK and all that, but finding my content is unnecessarily hard as it doesn't provide an option to browse by folder. This combined with a crappy search (that doesn't seem to reach e.g. episode description in the Summary field) makes finding a correct episode unnecessarily hard. You'd think a native official app would provide a superior user experience compared to a content replacement hack, but unfortunately that's not the case. I hope the Plex folks wake up and make the Android TV version usable.