Less than 48 hours after Chromecast was announced and just over two hours since we published a post on how Google’s senior vice president, Sundar Pichai, believes that Google TV will evolve alongside Chromecast, a rumor has emerged claiming that Google is designing yet another TV entertainment device.

It is reported that Google has been secretly working on a new set-top box (STB), and speculation indicates that the new device will be much like the Roku and Apple TV, its been documented that Google’s new unit will run Android 4.3 Jelly Bean and will feature a ton of goodies which no other STB’s on the market offer at this time.

Former Senior Vice President of Mobile and Digital Content at Google, Andy Rubin, supposedly revealed the device at CES earlier this year, highlighting the Android 4.1 operating system, together with video and text chat via a built-in Hangouts app.

The new set-top box is believed to feature a motion sensor not dissimilar to the ones packed inside Microsoft’s Kinect, but we have no information signifying what this sensor could be used for; although some guesswork suggests that it will automatically activate the device when you enter the room.

The new STB does bear some similarity to Google’s newly announced Chromecast unit, but its apparently more independent and does not require another device in order to power it. In addition, the device will be able to run a multitude of Android applications all available to download from the Play Store, including the popular entertainment apps: Netflix, Spotify, Pandora, and YouTube.

Google initially planned to announce and release the device at I/O this year, clearly this failed to happen, and some of us are now left wondering if the team at Mountain View HQ are planning to launch this new set-top box, or if it was scrapped in support of Chromecast.

• SourceThe Wall Street Journal