Xiaomi’s been the talking point here at Android Headlines since the past few weeks, and fortunately for them it’s for the good reasons. The 4 year old company from China’s been making headway into a lot of markets outside of its home country, including Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Singapore, among other markets. It’s been constantly selling a huge number of smartphones every week (often >50,000) in India, which is no mean feat for a company as young as Xiaomi.
If you aren’t aware, Xiaomi also makes a lot of devices that aren’t smartphones. This includes the almost-coveted Xiaomi Mi TV, the Mi Pad tablet, some smartphone accessories (including power banks, 3.5mm plugs, etc.), a gamepad, and even TV boxes. These TV boxes are powered by Android, and like other Xiaomi products, they offer some serious value for money… if you’re able to get your hands on them. According to sources in China, there’s another one of these TV boxes that we might see soon. Xiaomi’s yet to comment on it, as you would expect.
It’s being said that the TV box will come with a dual-core Cortex A9 processor clocked at 2GHz. Cortex A9 processors are known for not being the most power (and heat) efficient, but this being a TV box that’ll always be connected to a power source, shouldn’t bother you much with the low-ish efficiency. To go with that, it’ll have two RAM variants: 1 GB and 2 GB, pegged at 299 Yuan (US$48) and 399 (US$65) Yuan respectively. Of course, these are China-only prices; you can expect to pay a premium 20-30% over this base price to your favourite re-seller if you’re hoping to get one shipped to your door outside of China.
Graphics on the device will be taken care of by a Mali-450MP6 GPU, which will also have support for decoding 4K video. It’ll also have what Xiaomi are calling CMA (Contiguous Memory Allocation), which should help better performance. It’ll only have built-in storage worth 4GB (out of which a chunk will be reserved for the Android OS itself), so be prepared to invest on external storage if you’re wishing to enjoy your media on this one… or make the TV box your HTPC (home theater PC).