Finding entertainment has become both complicated and easier for most people nowadays. If that statement makes you lift the eyebrows, just look around. Now a days it’s much easier to access high speed internet through which you can watch your favourite show and stream latest music without interruptions.
And that’s why today I will be reviewing a device from Xiaomi which will provide you all sort of entertainment within a single device and it is called the MI BOX.
Xiaomi Mi Box Review
Now before we get started lets first unbox it and see what we are getting inside. The device comes in an orange and white coloured box. The very first thing that you will find is the Mi Box itself, along with that you get well written setup instructions, a handy little HDMI cable, a power adapter and an excellent quality Bluetooth remote that also includes a voice search button.
- Built & Design
So now let’s talk about it’s built & design, The Mi Box has a very minimal design which doesn’t stand out on your TV stand. The Mi box is made up of matte black coloured plastic which looks really great and feel premium. On paper, the Mi Box is impressive: It’s tiny! At less than 4 x 4 x 1 inches, that will fit virtually anywhere in or around your entertainment centre.
On the rear side you will find 4 different types of ports which include a power port, HDMI port, full-size USB port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. One of the best thing that I liked is that it offers a full size USB port and 3.5 mm Jack that really set the Mi Box apart because they allow the device to expand its storage and bypass the TV for audio playback, especially useful if you are using it with a display which lacks speakers or output.
The Mi Box is powered by a quad-core processor clocked at 2.0 GHz and coupled with 2 gigs of ram. A Mali 450 GPU is handling the GPU duties and is quite capable of running 4K content smoothly more on that in the later part of the video. Along with that you also get 8 gigs of internal storage of which only 4.4 GB is available out of the box, which I think is quite usable but you also get the option to simply insert a flash drive to the USB port the increase the storage.
I was testing this Mi box since almost 20 days and I was really impressed with the performance. All the apps are running just fine with no random app crashes and most of the games were running smoothly without breaking a sweat. However, I wasn’t able to test this with a 4k TV. I tested the Mi Box on my 23 inch AOC TV which has a 1080p resolution and things went very well, and as far as 4k playback is concern I think Mali 450 GPU can easily handle that too.
The initial setup of Mi box is incredibly simple install the remote batteries, connect HDMI and power cable, and turn on the Mi Box that it.
- Software
As for the software, the Mi Box runs Android TV based on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow out of the box and hopefully it will get updated to the android Nougat, but there aren’t many changes in that version. Since OEMs can’t mess with Android TV.
The home screen is Google’s Lean back Launcher, with about a dozen apps suggested but not pre-loaded, so they install from the Play Store upon first selection. Aside from quite a few CBS apps, these are all pretty standard.
My sole complaint is with what is done to the home screen. At all times you’ll find a list of apps two rows deep that shows apps that “Mi Box Recommends.” Unfortunately, there’s no way to reorganize this list or get rid of it entirely. I prefer to have all my apps listed in one section, so I found this pretty annoying.
- Remote
The remote that is Included with the Mi Box is a multi-function wireless remote and it fits well in the hand. On the remote you will find a power button, D-Pad, back and home button, voice search button, and volume rocker. Most of this is standard, but the power button and volume rocker is unique to the Mi Box compared to the rest of the Android TV devices we’ve seen on the market.
The power button has two functions. The first is, of course, to simply shut off the Mi Box. The second, and in my opinion better, is to activate sleep mode or to wake the device up. This is especially useful if your TV has HDMI CEC capability since it can turn the TV on or off for you.
Even more useful is the volume rocker. This allows you to directly control the audio output on the Mi Box, regardless of where it’s going. TV speakers, sound bar, Bluetooth speakers, this volume rocker controls them all.
People may be compelled to buy the Mi Box because it delivers 4K/HDR streaming at a lower price point than rivals. But it is user experience that truly makes someone love their device, and being built on top of Android TV has pluses and minuses.
On the upside, Mi Box has great voice recognition capabilities and it’s handy to be able to kick off a voice search with just a press of a button on the remote. With voice commands, you can also launch apps, change channels, search the web, go to some TV shows and movies directly and more.
On the downside, If you’re fine with being a bit locked into the Google ecosystem, you may not mind the fact that there’s no way to access Amazon’s content library or Prime Video, or that the “recommendations” at the top promote everything Google, like YouTube videos or Google Play Movies & TV which could be really annoying some times.
- Final thoughts
The overall experience of using Mi Box was quite satisfied and I really enjoyed using it. In fact, given the price I’d say that The Mi Box provides the most bang-for-the-buck. So if you need a simple streaming gadget with as many apps as possible then I will highly recommend you to buy this.
Now I imported this from a popular Chinese website called “Banggoods.com” for about 68 USD which is roughly equal to 4400 INR and the best thing is that I don’t have to pay anything extra for the custom as now a days I am importing lots of stuff form this website as of now my experience was good.
Purchase Link
Xiaomi Mi Box: https://goo.gl/hYKWhiXiaomi Best Buy 2017:https://goo.gl/7r5iuy
