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  3. Google is developing a home entertainment device, according to people with knowledge of the company’s plans, in a move that woul

Google is developing a home entertainment device, according to people with knowledge of the company’s plans, in a move that woul

admin2011-02-03  44
问题     Google is developing a home entertainment device, according to people with knowledge of the company’s plans, in a move that would bring it more broadly into consumer electronics.
    The device, which exists as a prototype and will eventually be sold as a branded item to consumers, is the company’s most significant venture into hardware. While the initial purpose of the device will be for streaming music, the eventual use could be much wider.
    Google still makes the vast majority of its money from Internet search. But as computing detaches from the desktop and laptop, the company cannot afford to be marginalized. The new device is an effort to control the design, production and sale of an entertainment device, just as its competitors have done so successfully.
    Owning Motorola—whose origins lie in a company that made an earlier generation of home entertainment systems before stumbling—will put Google into direct competition with the phone makers that use its Android software as well as Apple and its iPhone. A Google spokesman declined to comment.
    While Google has talked openly about its designs on consumers’ living rooms, news that the device was becoming a reality surfaced last week in an application the search giant filed with the Federal Communications Commission. In the application, Google said it would begin testing a device it labeled simply an "entertainment device".
    The device will have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and, as Google noted in the application, it will "connect to other home electronics equipment". The application, which was first reported by the tech Web site GigaOM, said Google would test the device for stability in employees’ homes through the summer.
    Analysts are wary of Google’s venture into the notoriously cutthroat hardware field. Apple has loyal, sometimes fanatical followers, and enviably rich profit margins. Amazon is willing to lose money on its devices and make it up on sales of content. Most other hardware makers have a much tougher slog.
    But Google is seen as having little choice.
    Last November, Google introduced its own streaming music service to compete with Apple and Amazon in the wars for digital media. The service lets users access music from various Internet connected devices. By manufacturing its own device, Google can tether those listeners back to its own product.
    Google’s larger goal, a person closely tied to the project said, was to connect everything in the home to the Internet, including light bulbs, speakers and TV sets. Google unveiled a "conceptual" version of a multi-purpose device last year at a developer conference.
    The perils of not having full control of the design and manufacturing of a device became apparent with Google TV, which was co-developed in 2010 by Google, Sony, Intel and Logitech. Reviewers hated it and the public scorned it. Guerrino De Luca, chief executive of Logitech has acknowledged publicly that the Google TV was "a mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature".
                                        From The New York Times, February 10, 2012
What is the passage mainly about?
选项 A、an entertainment device
B、a mistake of Google TV
C、digital media competition
D、home electrics connection
答案A
解析 本题为主旨题。文章主要介绍了谷歌研制的一种新的娱乐设备，它的功用及配备还有评论家们的担心，所以选项A合适。选项B、C和D只是文章中出现的细节。
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