Armed with that knowledge and having gotten one for a bargain basement price, I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of the little box - it's no rocket, but works amply well for my purposes (mostly - more to follow). I wasn't fussed with the maximum 1080P output, even when I subsequently upgraded to a Hisense M7000 4K smart TV, 1080P looked fine from couch distance. Apparently the Remix Mini is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign and seems to be a bit of a media darling in that respect. I did note that once it had loaded its initial updates, it was still on Android 5.1 / Lollipop.
I didn't think much of this at the time, assuming that the unit would still be well supported and would eventually upgrade itself to Marshmallow. Alas, 'twas not to be. Apparently on account of the Allwinner H64 SoC which powers the unit, it will never see an Android release beyond 5.1. This is very disappointing and not widely publicized information. I've got nothing against Lollipop, my previous Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 phone ran it without issue and I was happy with that, but times are moving on.
It does suck to have bought a new piece of kit and realize that it's pretty much obsolete out of the box. Sure, it was cheap but it's not just the cost - it's the time that you put in getting everything set up and working the way you want. I've picked up minor irritations with certain packages on the Play Store not functioning correctly (ahem MX Player ahem), but haven't yet been able to definitively pin this down to a Marshmallow issue. I'm obviously aware that you takes your chances with such Chinese products, but really think the already published reviews should be updated with this info so that buyers can make an informed decision. I hope this info is useful to other (potential) users of the same system.
No comments:
Post a Comment