hey everybody its lines I’ve been in we’re taking a look today at another low-cost Android box this is the me cool km8 it is selling right now on gearbest.com for $60 and it runs Android 8 Oreo with the regular Android TV interface is it one of those things where you get what you pay for yes unfortunately we’re going to dig into this a little bit more here in this review but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure if this came in free of charge through gearbest.com however all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review and no one has
reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what’s good and mostly bad about this device so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware not very well built it’s kind of a hollow plastic shell here it has an AM logic s 905 X processor built in this is the same chip that’s been on just about every cheap Android box we’ve looked at over the last eight months or so so the performance isn’t great but Android Oreo feels a little faster at least insofar as its interface is concerned versus other devices that we have tested this year it does support 4k 60 Hertz HDR at the maximum it was working fine on my OLED TV upstairs it only though has 2 gigabytes of ddr3 RAM which might limit some of the other Android things you decide to do with it 16 gigabytes of on-board storage and again it’s running with Android a Oreo on the side here you’ve got two USB 2.0 ports along with a micro SD card slot it’ll take up to a 64 gigabyte card you’ve got the antenna here for Wi-Fi it kind of flops around a little bit on you here does not support 5g wireless 5 gigahertz Wireless or AC but it does support 2.4 gigahertz Wireless 802 11 B G and n it also has bluetooth support which is good so you can plug in your game controllers and whatnot over here we’ve got the HDMI output here again it supports 60 Hertz at 4k most of the time your Ethernet port is here but it’s only 100 megabit Ethernet which means that if you’ve got a
blu-ray MKV rip that supports the 100 mm 4k standard you probably won’t be able to watch it reliably on here because there’s not enough bandwidth going in through that port there and you’ve got a analog AV out over there so that is the overall hardware let’s plug this thing in now boot it up and see how it performs so here we are on the home screen of the device here and it’s running with the vanilla Android 8 interface and although this has the same processor that we’ve seen on a bunch of other cheap boxes it does feel a bit snappier as you’re wandering around the menus here but there are some issues that we ran into here first is this when I go and click on Netflix to load up Netflix I get this error we can’t use Netflix on this box it just doesn’t work and I tried a whole bunch of different things and could not get it booted up apparently this is an issue that is cropping up on other me cool boxes they have some kind of thing you have to sideload onto it to fix it but it’s not compatible from what I’ve read with this box which really leads me to think this may not be a certified device as some of the marketing here might indicate I also tried to load up Netflix on my phone and chromecast it over because it does support Chrome casting and many of the apps that I tried in fact many of the other boxes we looked at would not find the me cool box in Netflix when I selected Chrome casting devices but here we are able to connect to the km8 or at least it shows up but the connection
usually doesn’t work so sometimes you can get it to this point here and then what will happen here is you’ll get a similar error popping up once the chromecast application loads up on there so we’ll go ahead and try to hit play here on this particular show that’s running and I can see my phone here is already starting to give me some errors on Netflix too so I don’t think this is a certified device by any stretch because you can’t get Netflix to work on it which is one of the basic things that you might want to do I did find though that HBO Go was able to work with it so we can dial up HBO on my phone here and see if that connects here we’ll let that work on the background there and we’ll load up this show here and hit play on that so we were able to get more than what we’ve been able to get on prior cheap boxes to work with chrome casting it looks like it’s showing up in most of the apps that I’ve tried but the big one Netflix which is what a lot of people want to watch on a box doesn’t work on here and I think that is pretty much a deal killer for many including me and another hint that this may not be a Google certified device was when I loaded up the HD homerun app a silicon dust the makers of the HD homerun are an occasional sponsor here on the channel in full disclosure but they make a cable television tuner that I use here in the house to watch and record live TV and they just added the
ability to watch DRM protected channels on that device with Android provided that the device is certified by Google and sure enough when I go to click on HBO here for example check this out we will soon get the dreaded content protection error that we used to get on all of these Android boxes before they implemented the DRM protection so this app is the latest app but because this is not a Google certified device we can’t play DRM protected content on it so another strike against it but there are a few more to talk about too now we were able to get it to load up flex and Cody and play back all of our blu-ray mkv files without too many issues but there are some problems for the home theater enthusiasts out there namely it doesn’t switch into 24p mode even when you configure the applications to do that so that’s another strike against it most films are shot at 24 frames per second and to get the right look you got to be running at 24 P you can’t do it automatically here unfortunately it also did not support lossless audio so no DTS HD no Dolby Atmos the best it did was Dolby Digital Plus when
we were running those movies with pass-through enabled on the box which is unfortunate because we’ve looked at other boxes running with the same exact processor and I believe one or two for me cool actually that did work with it so for some reason they disabled that but you do get a nice logo printed on the front of the box for showing off to your friends I guess so that was another issue that we ran into with it there and as a result of those two things I don’t think it’s going to be something that home theater enthusiasts will want to look at even if it’s just for a secondary box because your media will not playback the way you want it to and that’s an issue especially at the $60 price point I would have expected a little bit more out of the box given the hardware configuration now if you’re integrated with Google assistant in your home this will also work with it it’s not voice-activated though you have to push the button here on the remote so what I can do is push it down show me the weather in New York City and here’s
the problem is that it doesn’t always start listening right when you push the button so it often doesn’t get the whole sentence in on its recognition so you have to hold it down show me the weather in New York City and then it will start working so a lot of little glitches here or there that make this a really imperfect device unfortunately and to be honest it doesn’t do all that much more than a thirty dollar box does maybe the integrated Bluetooth might be a reason to spend a little bit more versus a thirty dollar box that doesn’t have it but the problem that I’ve got here is that it doesn’t support some of the basic things that a TV box should support namely number one Netflix I don’t think this thing is ever going to get updated to work with that I can’t even find a me cool website to try to get some answers to questions that I might have with it doesn’t support 24p doesn’t support the lossless audio and some of the other stuff it just doesn’t do all that well including the voice recognition we were not able to run any benchmarks on this either 3dmark kept crashing every time we tried to load it up to see what its gaming performance will be but our experience with other devices with the same chip means you can certainly play a lot of the basic casual Android games that are available on the store those should work ok and I also think you could probably do well with retro emulation from the PlayStation 1 backwards it certainly won’t do GameCube or any of the more advanced emulators out there but 8 and 16-bit stuff and maybe a little bit of
PlayStation should work ok on the box here but overall I just have a really hard time recommending this one it just doesn’t play Netflix to begin with but it also has some other issues with some very basic things that I think a TV box needs to support at the $60 price point now I do like the fact that it has Ethernet built in that’s something the me box which costs a little bit more but is an official Android TV box lacks but all the problems were experiencing with this thing does not make it a good alternative to the me box so our quest for the perfect alternative android TV box will continue let me know if you’ve seen anything I should be looking at but for now I’m going to suggest you not buy this one until next time this is LAN Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon TV supporters including gold level supporters Chris Allegretto the four guys with quarters podcast Tom Albrecht bill Reiner and Kellyanne Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
Read More: Review HP Sprocket 2nd Edition Portable Photo Printer
