Sony Google TV-powered NSZ-GP9, NSZ-GS7, and motion remote hands-on video and pictures

Sony’s just announced its second stab at Google TV products with the NSZ-GP9 Blu-ray player and the NSZ-GS7 streamer. We just snuck a look at a few of them during the press conference and even lived to put The Verge up on a 55-inch HDTV.

So the remote isn’t exactly what you’d expect. It’s a little lighter than it looks, the entire trackpad is a button, and the keyboard is made of rubber — there’s sort of a springy feel to the whole thing. Sony’s done a little additional work smoothing out and integrating the Google TV UI with its own design language, and the result is fairly pleasing, although it’s still not perfectly intuitive; we hit the home and back buttons to reorient ourselves quite a bit. The trackpad works well enough, although there’s no two-finger scrolling or gesture support, so you have to jump up to the D-pad to scroll or move around any of the menus. We tried out the “three-axis” motion controls on a game called Dot, but it didn’t seem to be working very well — we never got it to consistently move our dot as expected. (We’ll chalk that up to early prototype glitches for now.)

Overall it’s better than the disastrous first-generation Sony Google TV remote, but it feels like there’s still a bit of a learning curve — we’ll have to live with it a while to make a final impression.