Any New Devices on the Horizon?

by ThenThereWasReddit

My current streaming box is on it's last leg. Laggy, remote is dying, frequent crashes, etc. It looks like the Shield and Mibox are the only options at the moment. The Mibox seems to have enough negative impressions to scare me away and the Shield is $200 for 2015 tech, which I get is still really good tech but I can't help but wonder if something better is just around the corner. Has there been any recent announcements about anything else out there or is there a newer, reliable box in existence -- Android or not -- that can run Sling, Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu, and VRV?

salzberrysteakroger

Xiaomi did just release their new mi box that is coming out October 19 in the US. I know I'll be getting one.

vjollcaf

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There is a new device that has been released on Kickstarter known as Hello 2, it allows you to download any app that you like, also what i liked is that you can use controller to play games and also has a whiteboard touch tv, you can find it on kickstarter while its still there... click here

ProgrammerPlus

Shield was refreshed in 2017. Its not 2015 tech. NVIDIA works in a different way than other manufacturers and also its not like we move from 4K to 8K in last couple of years. So yeah Shield still actually has overkill hardware for what it does!

BiggussDikkuss

I find this 2018 FireTV Stick - Twitter post illuminating....

Seems Amazon might actually be listening to users needs:

https://twitter.com/Elias/status/1047504714529529856

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And then there is the near complete - Apple TV 4K, but we won't mention that for fear of upsetting the Android TV Zombie army in this sub reddit...

;-)

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The major problem with shiny new cheap Android TV media players is the majority of them will be using a pretty basic, old AMLogic S905X chipset, combined with a buggy new AMLogic Linux Kernel. You need to get the Kernel and it's drivers sorted out before anything else for reliability.

Give it about a 6 months to a year and AMLogic might iron out a bunch of Oreo Firmware bugs. Maybe. It may happen sooner if there are Mass returns of unreliable - Mi Box S devices to Walmart.

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The one advantage is Google are in what I call an OS optimisation phase to make the Oreo and OS releases coming down the pipe run faster and smoother on low powered chipsets with limited RAM. So there will be improvements.

They have also implemented (the long overdue) Project Treble to isolate the OS from the underlying device drivers and Linux Kernel so Google's OS's releases can be rolled out much quicker in the future to all Android devices.