Pretty nifty but what's so special right? Surely, we've seen plenty of multi-platform synced games and apps. There are apps where you can transform your phone into a mouse, or your tablet into a secondary screen, remote desktop client and the list really just goes on.
What really blew my mind was its simplicity in the process of syncing devices. Google cleverly uses a combination of your usual CSS3, HTML5 audio blah blah but really shows the potential of HTML5 technology like the Touch API and WebSockets.
I was very skeptical of how good this would be and whether or not they pulled off two major problems of similar services. The very first question that popped up to me was 'how did they pull off connecting two devices?'. From personal experience the biggest limitation to the above existing technologies is how bothersome it is to connect two devices together and keeping them synced. Typically you need to download and install the respective clients to each and every machine you plan to connect up and sometimes do some manual tweaking in order for them to work properly.
Here's how Chrome Super Sync Sports syncs up:
On the browser on my computer:
and then following the instructions, on my phone:
That's it. That simple.
The second question was 'how fast is it'. At the end of the day, if it feels crap to the end user it's no good period. I give extreme importance to user experience. No matter how good the game/service is, or whether they pulled off a complete 'browser only' syncing between devices it's nothing more than just a show off trophy used for bragging.
Once you've gone through the painless process of typing in a five-digit code to sync the two browsers you're taken to a screen where you can select your character who'll be representing you. When you by habit try selecting your character with your mouse, you get a rather frustrated guy telling you to use your phone to select your character.
You should instead, use the retro style D-pad on the browser of your synced up phone.
Using the D-pad I was able to get a good feel for its latency, or 'how much it lagged'. I must say I was really impressed at the really low latency. Sure, it didn't react instantaneously but it was fast enough.
Thinking of the possibilities this kind of technology brings leaves me speechless. I truly believe that this will definitely be part of 'the future'.
Trouble-free seamless sans-client syncing could mean next level YouTube browsing, a comeback of Cooking Mama style games and Nintendo DS-like Facebook games and who knows what some geek in the basement of their parents' could be making out of this.
At the moment it only works on Google Chrome (but that shouldn't be a problem right? You shouldn't really be using anything else :P) and Google hasn't really published anything detailing the the specifics but should do soon.
Ugh, creative devs hurry and make crazy things with this please.
