We’ve received another Android TV box to test today so I thought I’d give you a quick overview as it’s an improved version of an already very popular box. This is from EntertainmentBox – it’s the EBox T8 V and is powered by an Amlogic S912 64bit octa-core CPU. It’s powerful, stylish and comes with a hard drive bay underneath – something that a lot of customers loved on the V4 version.
Here’s that drive bay, which is accessible after popping open a small panel..
This comes with a stack of apps pre-installed, and you can add further apps and games if you wish. There’s a three USB ports (two on the side, one on the back) so that you can put USB pen drives in there or, if you wish, a 2.4GHz mouse or pointer device.
With this you’ll be able to play games downloaded from the Google Play store, similar to your tablet or phone. Plus, let’s not forget, you don’t really need to have a full TV. You can instead get yourself a gaming monitor and turn that into a TV if you wish. Get yourself some advice from the likes of The Gaming Monitor to make the most of the 4K HDR coming out of this unit. The Ebox has 2GB RAM, 16GB of on-board storage, a gigabit Ethernet connection and outputs to HDMI 2.0.
On the side, there’s an SD slot so that you can enjoy photos and the rear has standard phono (RCA) video and audio ports if you don’t have HDMI or perhaps want to hook this up to a Slingbox.
Up front, there’s a swish clock so that it looks like a proper piece of home TV entertainment and it’s all controlled via a great remote. If you’ve got lots of movies and pictures already (perhaps on a NAS or similar), you can whack the SATA drive in the bottom or put a USB OTG connection in the back and have it all on your monitor or TV in seconds.
This being a media box, Kodi is pre-installed and easy to access. There’s two different types of menu – a “starter” and an “expert” mode – I preferred the latter but I’ll have a lot more about this shortly when I do the full review. It’s definitely very quick, responsive and although I’m using a wired LAN connection you can instead connect via WiFi (it does dual-band 2.4 / 5.8GHz).
This runs Android 6.0.1 and the skin they’ve added on top is rather swish and easy to navigate, with updates and the initial setup being a painless experience.
We’ll have more on this in the full review, which will be online shortly.