Nearly two weeks after pulling its Google TVs from stores, TCL has put the sets back on the market after issuing a software update with “significant improvements.”
As of Wednesday morning, TCL’s 5- and 6-Series Google TVs were once again listed on Best Buy, and most are available for significant discounts. For example, TCL’s 75-inch 6-Series mini-LED 4K TV is on sale for $1,300, a steep $1,000 price drop, while the 75-inch 5-Series 4K TV is selling for $1,000, a $300 discount.
On its support site, TCL said that its Google TVs should update themselves automatically, and it also gave users instructions for manually installing the patch.
Here’s TCL’s statement from its support page:
TCL is committed to delivering premium products with world-class experiences and the new product featuring Google TV is certainly no different. Recent software updates have allowed us to make significant improvements on the stability and speed of the TCL televisions featuring Google TV. With these updates, this product now represents the powerful performance that TCL and Google believe is the future of TV.
A few TCL Google TV owners on Reddit have reported that their sets appear more responsive since the update, but we’ll have to wait and see whether the software patch actually squashes the worst of the bugs.
Best Buy yanked the listings for TCL’s 5- and 6-Series Google TVs earlier this month following months of complaints about crashing apps, buggy or unresponsive screen settings, random power cycling, and other issues. TCL admitted that its Google TVs were “facing challenges with the stability of the user interface” and promised improvements.
TCL released its 5-Series and 6-Series Google TVs earlier this year. The 6-Series Google TV line boasts 4K panels with mini-LED backlighting, while the 5-Series 4K TV comes with more traditional LED displays with local dimming. Both lines support Dolby Vision and HDR10+, along with VRR (variable refresh rate) for gamers.
TCL also manufactures several lines of Roku TVs (read our review of the TCL 6-Series 8K TV), as well as some lower-end TVs powered by Android TV. Neither the Roku TV or Android TV models have seen the same performance problems that were plaguing the company’s Google TVs.