Among others, Amlogic and Allwinner have tried hardest to bring down Rockchip’s dominance in the TV box and tablet market in China (and elsewhere), but from what we can tell, there’s no stopping Rockchip at the moment. The company today showed off US$10 worth of equipment, which plugs on to your TV and is more than just a streaming device… it’s a proper, Android-powered TV box.
Of course, US$10 isn’t the price you can expect to pay to get hold of these as an end user. You’ll probably have to shell out twice as much or even a little on top of that to get it shipped to your doorstep; the beauty of the product, however, is that it still looks like a worth buy. It comes with a dual-core processor — the RK3036 — along with a Mali 400 graphics chip, complete with 256MB DDR3/DDR3L RAM and Android v4.4 KitKat installation.
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Like you would believe, even though the system makes for a full-fledged device with its own operating system, it’ll largely be restricted to a video streaming/local playback device for older-gen TV owners that aren’t keen on shelling out obnoxious amounts of money to get a new smart TV.
Liliputing spent time with the device at CES 2015, take a look.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyZsfWUozmo] [Sources ( 1, 2)]
RK3036 is an ‘old’ chipset nowadays. What can you expect with so little CPU ,GPU (Mali 600) and memory (256K)? I can’t see the usefullness of such a device… Price is right, but then?
I had several Android TV dongles ( RK3066, then RK3186 and finally RK3288): RK3288 is a minimal imho for “cast”-ing…
TV box on the real cheap is reusing that old tablet you broke the screen.