Just got mine today from Amazon, ordered a few days after it came out.
I have played around with it for an hour so far.
Impressions so far:
- easy setup and very intuitive
- "tab-casting" (similar to Apple's Airplay, but just for the tab) is surprisingly weak. I expected better; certainly airplay from my iphone or ipad is far better; Airplay looks cleaner and it's extremely snappy even if there is a sub-second delay. But tab-casting on my laptop (I think the laptop runs about $700 right now to buy it) has more pixelation and the latency just while scrolling on a web page is very off-putting
- netflix and youtube apps work okay, but take a while to get loaded. Also when I went from a netflix app to youtube and tried to natively cast (using the chromecast's youtube app as opposed to mirroring the browser tab) it didn't restart properly until a page refresh
- mirroring a video that was playing in the chrome tab, similar to Wired's July article on torrents in Chromecast, was totally unusable. Frames dropped through the floor and it was crap
- Chromecast doesn't have a Hulu app but I was pleasantly surprised to see that i was able to mirror it just fine, full-screen
- all screen edges are cut off a small bit when mirroring. I haven't looked into the source of this further yet, though
- I use adblock (and I know you do, too), which means no ads on youtube, but only if played natively through the browser. That worked ok--performance was okay, but nonetheless the chromecast constantly tries to encourage you to use its app, which means you also are going to see the ads...
For $35 it appears a good device, even if it's only used for netflix in another TV room. I assume it will become more polished, but despite some issues that $35 price tag is damn low and I'm willing to be quite forgiving.