Minix have been making some quality TV box hardware since a few years now. Among the hordes of Chinese OEMs producing budget TV boxes, Minix are only among the few to have been friendly to developers.
The latest from the Minix stable is the Neo X8-H Plus box, which, as the name suggests, is an upgrade from the already-powerful Neo X8-H. The Plus version brings to the table an Amlogic S812 SoC, running at 2GHz. Since there’s no real dearth of power, the SoC affords the Cortex A9 architecture.
There’s also 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage on-board with the Neo X8-H Plus. The device continues to offer on-board 4K decoding capabilities, and still comes in at an affordable US$160. Dual band WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, Gigabit Ethernet are the connectivity features the Neo X8-H has going for it.
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Out of the box, the device will run Android v4.4 KitKat. No word on a Lollipop update yet, but Minix TV boxes are fairly popular so you can expect a fair degree of community support. Like mentioned before, the Neo X8-H Plus can be bought from various Chinese e-retailers including Geekbuying and Aliexpress, with prices hovering around the US$160 mark. It isn’t clear if an addition Minix M1 air mouse comes as standard with the package, but Geekbuying are offering one for free with it.
They havent released any OTA for the S802 and pushing new products to market. Not so impressing
They havent released any OTA for the S802 and pushing new products to market. Not so impressing
The device is way overpriced. Can get HPH RK3288 for same price with HDMI v2.0 and 40% faster CPU at same clock speed. GPU is also 2-2.5 times faster and with DHL delivery included.
Software support is better for performance in these boxes than specs. Minix rules here though the competition is closing in.
The RK3188 had some serious flaws i.e. dark picture.
The Amlogic chipset has the best picture quality as I understand it. Most people use these boxes for media playback.