Once humanity satisfied every basic need, it started fighting boredom!
Okay, probably that's too much drama, but we are entering the entertaining section, so let's talk about having some fun!
Entertainment is a huge market and Google jumped into it pretty quickly with its Nexus Player and its Chromecast devices:
The previous image shows the latest model of Google Chromecast. When Google approached this market, they decided to provide users with a device that was as easy as possible to set up. Google Chromecast has one HDMI connector and a USB power cable; that's it. You connect the HDMI to your TV, connect the power supply, and your TV can now connect to your smart phone.
Your smartphone becomes your remote and, with a few clicks, you can start streaming any multimedia content you want, straight to your TV: your preferred YouTube channels, your preferred movies from Google Play Store, your music from Google Play Music and hundreds of third-party apps can be sources of content.
If you don't like TV and you are a music addict, Google has you covered with Chromecast Audio:
As for the Chromecast, Chromecast Audio is very easy to connect to your Hi-Fi system and it's easy to set up via the Chromecast app you can install on your Android smartphone.
One of the key features is that it has a standalone Wi-Fi connection via your home Wi-Fi system, so that it can be instructed to reproduce your music instead of requiring your phone to stream the music to the Chromecast Audio. You control it using your smartphone, but there is no battery drain, because there is no persistent Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection between your phone and your Chromecast Audio.
Nowadays, when we think about Android-powered toys, we can only think about drones!
The first and most popular, the Parrot ARDrone in the previous picture, set the bar and drove the market for quite a while. Over time, lots of commercial alternatives showed up, but, as with the smart mirror, the RC toys community also went full Do-It-Yourself.
During Droidcon Turin 2015 Hackaton, we demonstrated how you could build an RC car, powered by UDOO, controlled via Wi-Fi using an Android device… in 24 hours: https://www.hackster.io/team-dronix-alter-ego/dronixcar-37b81a?f=1#:
The RC car was equipped with a video camera, streaming in real time to the smartphone. The smartphone acted as video consumer and remote controller.
The whole project was released as open source, in the classic Android/Linux tradition.