Lenovo is making a bid for living room dominance with Cast, a cheap Chromecast-cum-Nexus Player hybrid that costs $49 – or £32.
Like the Asus-made Nexus Player, Lenovo’s device is a hockey puck-sized streamer that plugs into your TV via HDMI.
Like Chromecast, it communicates wirelessly with peripheral devices like phones and tablets. Despite its name, Lenovo Cast doesn’t make use of Google’s Cast API – it’ll instead use DLNA and Miracast.
Related: How to stream from phones and tablets to TVThis will let you stream content to your TV from a multitude of phones, tablets and laptops – although depending on the exact make of your phone, tablet or laptop, this might not work 100 per cent of the time.
Because Miracast isn’t an open standard, we’re stuck with situations where a Brand X phone might not work with a Brand Y device – even though on paper they’re both Miracast compatible.
The same may well apply to Lenovo’s Cast – it’s likely that there will be some phone and tablets out there that won’t play ball.
Should your peripherals actually work with the Cast, Lenovo says that you’ll be able to beam content from up to 20 metres away, thanks to dual-band WiFi support, giving it another edge over Chromecast.
Lenovo Cast is due to hit the shelves in the US this Autumn, but we’ve not yet heard of a UK release date or price for this yet.
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