Sungale recently upgraded its flagship Cloud-TV-Box with some of today’s hottest technology poising to separate themselves from the pack in a crowded media player market. This month’s big shake up was Samsung acquiring Boxee and shutting down its Cloud DVR. With some room on the shelves now, Sungale’s set top box (STB) can now flex its Android powered muscles to fill the XBMC void. In addition to the open source media center base that popularized its predecessor Boxee, Cloud TV Box STB370 flaunts some trendy Home Theater compatibility:
- Android 4.2.2 (Jellybean), including applications from Google Play
- Miracast
- Uwand air controller
Cloud TV Box is one of few STB to combine all of these capabilities, placing it directly, if not above, feature parity with AppleTV and Roku. Many of today’s Smart HDTV’s already offer one (or multiple paths) to the content provide by Cloud TV Box, but there are plenty of home theaters that lack one or more of the key features above. While motion control is nice, but not a necessarily a must have, adding Miracast offers equivalent support to Airplay only across multiple manufacturers. Now you may easily retrofit existing HDTV’s lacking integrated Wi-Fi with this emerging wireless mirroring technology. The showstopper however may be its Chrome base and Google Play compatibility.
Android is known for fragmentation. When considering Smart TV’s apps arena the situation is significantly worse. While support for major content owners is near ubiquitous (Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, etc.), smaller players have to either pick and choose which platforms to support or rely on the manufacturer or a third party to sponsor a “one off” development. Would you like to bet on what one of those platforms they do choose to develop for now a days? Android. Thanks to Cloud TV Box, content owners large and small can now have built in support for their content, on a larger HDTV install base. Develop for Android, get multiple platforms for “free.” That’s an offer that is hard to top, especially given AppleTV’s unclear app policy. Given Android’s growing popularity and market share, Cloud TV Box should slide nicely into the gear rack of any Google Lifestyler’s home theater.
In addition to the new check box items, some of the killer features Cloud TV Box STB370 has touted since its inception are:
- webcam support for use with chat apps, such as Skype
- full functioning Internet browser
- MicroSD in case you zoom by built-in 4GB memory
That is all in addition to integrated 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and ethernet jack; full 1080p video processing; and if you act now, the HDMI cable is included!
Happy viewing!
After the Transition 