hey everybody it’s lon seiben and i’m always on the lookout for unique android tv devices and this one certainly qualifies as that this is the philips kitchen tv at least that’s what they’re calling it on its amazon listing and this pairs up a set of 16 watt stereo speakers and a 24 inch television that of course is running android tv as its operating system and we’re going to be taking a closer look at all the good things and bad things this device is all about here in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that i paid for this with my own funds all of the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this device is all about now the price point on this is about 250 although it does go on sale from time to time so be on the lookout for that i was disappointed with the display that they paired up with this device it is a nice size at 24 inches so this would be good for a larger kitchen i suppose but it’s only 720p and typically at this price point you’re gonna get a 1080p set these days so that was a bit of a disappointment but from across a room it’s not going to be that big of a deal and for a 720p set it doesn’t look all that bad but again i think a 1080p would have been a better fit here at the price point the speaker bar here is fused to the display you cannot move them independently it is all a single unit although it is super lightweight i would say the whole package here is under 10 pounds so it’s not hard to move around and slide across the counter or table or something if you need to do that so that’s not too bad there the speaker will work as a google assistant so if i turn the tv off here and just issue voice commands out of the air it will do a lot of the basics so i could ask it hey what time is it it’s 3 51 p.m and i’ll get the time now i could also ask it to turn the tv on but i found that about 50 percent of the time it doesn’t know what i’m talking about and the other 50 of the time it does turn the television on so as a google assistant it’s okay but it’s not great you do get a little bit more functionality with the assistant when you have android booted up on screen and i’ll show you some things that it can do in a little bit although it’s not able to do everything google devices allow you to do so this is a little more limited in its assistant there are a lot of ports on this one so you have a usb port here so you can plug in memory sticks and
hard drives and game controllers and keyboards you have an antenna input here so you can pull in over the air tv it’s got an integrated tuner and i’ll show you that interface in a few minutes so you could use a network tuner like we’re going to do in a minute or just attach up an antenna and you’re good to go and you can watch live tv on it you’ve got an optical output here so you could plug it into a nicer stereo system i guess if you wanted to you have two hdmi ports on here so you can plug in other things like game consoles and other hdmi devices and then there’s an ethernet jack here which we’re using to connect it to my network but it also has wi-fi and bluetooth on board too now i found the sound quality out of the speaker bar to be okay it’s not audiophile quality but it does have a good amount of bass it’s not going to be like a subwoofer but it does have some range to it although i found some of the topper end audio at the higher frequencies will be a little tinny so again not the best speakers but very loud and can certainly be heard across a room without issue you do have a volume control up here you have a microphone mute button here and a power button so you can do some things right on the device here there is a remote that they package in as well kind of matches the fit and finish of the television so you have your standard controls here there’s a button that’s hardwired to the tv function app which i’ll show you in a minute and then of course you’ve got your youtube and netflix buttons so a little bit more than your standard android tv remote and you can also issue commands through the remote without having to issue the trigger word so you can push this
button and speak into the remote or shout across the room at the built-in microphone on the speaker here now navigating the interface is very straightforward it is stock android tv nothing fancy about it front and center though you’ll have the tv app and you can load it up by clicking on the app here or just pushing the tv button when you do that it’s going to pull up the android live channels app and if you have an antenna attached it will go out and find all the channels that can pick up over the air and give you a very nice channel guide here now what i love about android tv is that it works with multiple sources and it mixes them all together into a single channel guide so as you can see here i’m able to browse through the channels that i have available through my hd home run tuner and in full disclosure they are an occasional sponsor here on the channel so i can jump to any cn here which is new england cable news i’ve got an idea as to what’s currently on air and it’s a really nice tv interface and if you have an app that supports the live channels app it will show up here as a source and you can pretty much live in that live tv interface it also has a few other cool features like time shifting so i can pause live tv and resume it there’s not a lot of memory on this device so there’s going to be a limit to how much you can use this feature but it’s pretty cool to have all of that integrated right in so it’s pretty cool to just be able to attach an external antenna to this thing and then pull in stuff over the air and then integrate some of your other digital providers into a common interface and again that’s one of the strengths i think of
android tv other apps here work just fine so we can load up youtube for example it does spring up pretty quickly it feels pretty snappy too i think that’s one of the advantages of running with a 720p resolution the little processor doesn’t have to work as hard to render things on screen and as you can see it’s pretty quick to jump in between apps once they’re loaded up and netflix here seems to work just fine again you’re not going to get some crazy 4k resolution you’re going to be locked in at 720p but by and large most of your favorite apps will be here the ones that i noticed that were not here are amazon prime video apple tv is not on here but most of the major providers should be available through the google play store now because the set is an official android tv it supports chromecasting and what you can do is take unsupported apps like prime video here install them on a phone and then cast from the phone to the device so if i click on the little chromecast icon here on the lower right hand corner and select the kitchen tv you’re going to see that it’s going to power the tv on and is now ready to accept my content requests from the app on the phone so i can click on one of these shows my kids have been watching hit play and now i’m getting amazon prime content playing back here on the tv set so there are some ways to circumvent apps that are not on board provided the app has chromecast support now unfortunately as a kitchen device the assistant here falls short of what you might get out of a nest hub from google so for example on my little nest device upstairs i can ask the hub for a timer and it
will give me a timer and display it on screen if i ask it for a second timer it will oblige and then give me both timers on screen at the same time i’ve had as many of like four or five of these going at once with all different times on them and it’s been very useful for cooking in the kitchen and you can see here me adding a third one to the mix and it will give you all three really nice and handy here you don’t get that so if i ask you for a timer now give me a ten minute timer what will happen is it will give it to me second timer for ten minutes and i already set one before but i had no idea i had another time we’re already going because it doesn’t display anything so once the timer is set it kind of runs in the background but you don’t know it’s there until it’s done you can’t see where you’re at with the timer as it’s going another issue i ran into with this is that it’s not so great for recipes so on the google nest hub thing when you ask it for a crock pot recipe it will pull up a special interface from different providers i can click on one here or ask it to pull one up and then it does a nice step-by-step thing so if i ask it now for the same thing give me a crockpot chicken soup recipe it will get the command correct but it’s not going to give me a special recipe interface like i might get on another google device i’m just going to get a bunch of youtube results so unfortunately as a kitchen assistant it falls short which was a big bummer because i would have loved to have that little nest hub be larger for my size room and unfortunately this one’s just not going to perform the same way and it also fell short as a home control device so i
was unable to get this thing to control my lights like my other android tv boxes can do it also wouldn’t pull up my security cameras which was a real letdown given how big the screen is on this thing and i’m guessing at some point in the future we could get a software update to enable those things but for something that’s designed to sit in your kitchen the fact that it doesn’t work well as a kitchen assistant or a home assistant is a big letdown now you can also play some casual android games on here that you might find on the google play store i was able to pair up my game controller here via bluetooth i did notice a bit of input lag on the bluetooth connections here so you might want to go in with a directly wired usb controller but i don’t think this is something that a serious game player may want to purchase i did also use the geforce now service with it a little bit earlier which is a game streaming service so this game is not running natively on the tv it’s being streamed from nvidia servers but it worked okay with that as well and of course you’ve got the hdmi ports on the side so you could connect up a nintendo switch or something else to it again this is not the most responsive display so you’re going to have a little bit more input lag on this versus a more serious gaming monitor or tv but as a casual device i think it works pretty well for people looking to play some casual games every once in a while all right let’s move on now to a couple of techier topics because i know a lot of you will want to know what’s going on inside of this thing so we sideloaded cpuz and we discovered that it’s got a cortex a53 processor inside a quad core chip we ran the 3d mark slingshot test a
little bit earlier and we got a score of 337 and that puts it below the performance that you might get out of a fire tv stick or a tivo stream 4k or a google chromecast but it’s good enough i think for the things that this tv was designed to do uh the system ram is about two gigabytes it comes in here at 1.8 so not a lot of ram but better than what you might see out of a cheap stick or something so not bad there and you saw that it was able to keep uh netflix and youtube open in the background so we could very easily switch between them so not bad there it only has though about four gigabytes of internal storage and right now i’ve only got about a gigabyte free after installing a couple of games and apps and whatnot so you’re going to be a little limited by the storage there but you could of course attach a usb device and adopt that as internal storage if you wanted to now the biggest problem i have with this device is that it’s only running android 8 so we’re a couple of versions behind here and a bigger problem is that the security patch level is from july of 2019 well over a year ago from the time that i’m recording this video and what i’m fearful of here is that this is another one of these cheap one-off devices that a manufacturer puts out into the marketplace and never updates again i did try and get the updates going on it i went into the menu and clicked the update button and there wasn’t one available i left it on overnight hoping maybe that there’s a cue it has to get into but nope it is stuck on android 8.
And there’s no indication that this device is going to get any updates in the future on the philips support page for the product i hope that they do support it better than i’m seeing right now and if they do provide a security update maybe they can do some additional updates to its functionality because it’s not very good as a kitchen assistant or a home assistant we couldn’t get timers to display on screen for example we couldn’t pull up my security cameras like i can on other android tv devices and in many ways it kind of falls short in other areas it actually does okay it’s got that built-in tuner which is very nice to see on something like this the speaker here is pretty decent for a kitchen kind of device you can use the tv just by issuing voice commands without having to pick up the remote all of those things are pretty good and it’s doing a pretty good job running basic android apps too but again it’s something that’s being marketed as a home device in the kitchen it doesn’t do those assistant tasks the way a device like this should and as a result i don’t think at its current price point it’s something i can recommend that’s going to do it for now until next time this is lon cybin thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters tom albrecht chris allegretta mike patterson and bill pomerantz if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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