Amkette EVOTV2 4K Ultra HD entertainment box review: Turn your idiot box into a smart one

While there will undoubtedly be some people out there who still use good old CRT TVs, the television technology has come really far in the past few years. Forget LCDs and LEDs, we now have TVs with paper-thin curved displays. Technology companies are working on the next big trend in the television industry – SmartTVs. These can not only be used to watch your favourite movies and shows, but also run apps, stream videos, browse the internet and do a lot more. But what if you already have a regular TV that you want to make ‘smart’?

This is where streaming media players like Apple TV, Chromecast or the case in point – Amkette EvoTV 2 4K Ultra HD.

An upgraded version of the original EvoTV, the EvoTV 2 4K Ultra HD can be used to stream online content an comes with some pre-installed apps, allowing you to convert your regular TV into a smart one. As the name suggests, it also supports 4K video playback. But at a price of Rs 7,499, should you consider it?

We spent some time with the Amkette EvoTV 2 4K Ultra HD, and this is what we think of it.



Design and accessories



Amkette EVO TV 2 4K Ultra HD has simple aesthetics. In terms of design, the 2-inch thick device is barely the size of a slice of bread. Its top side has a nice matte finish with the ‘Amkette’ logo printed in the centre, while the rest of the body, with all the connectivity ports on the sides, is glossy. The bottom side has a clean Blue rubber-like finish, along with exhaust grilles and firm rubber feet to ensure that the device sits firmly on a flat surface.The right side consists of an SD/MMC card slot, along with three USB ports. At the back, there’s another USB port, in addition to S/PDIF (1), AV-out (1), HDMI (1), Ethernet (1) and Power (1) ports. With all these ports placed arranged tidily around the sides, the EvoTV 2 4K Ultra HD has a clean yet premium design. It’s lightweight as well.Amkette EvoTV 2 4K Ultra HD comes with a handy remote controller which is also quite small and thus, fits easily into the hand. Other accessories provided include a power adapter and one HDMI cable.

Performance

Amkette EvoTV 2 4K Ultra HD brings a lot to the table. It not only allows you to stream content both online and via pre-installed apps, but can also be connected to your smartphone or laptop for an enjoyable media-consumption experience. As the name suggests, the EvoTV 2 can play/stream 4K resolution video content.

During our testing, we found the setup process to be easy. It takes about 5-7 minutes, and you can use the provided HDMI cable to connect the EvoTV 2 to your TV and use HDMI as the source. When connected to a smartphone or a laptop for the first time, the streaming media player asks the user to download a companion app.

Running Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, the UI of the Amkette EvoTV 2 4K Ultra HD is quite neat. Some of the pre-installed apps include Netflix, YouTube, Hotstar, Voot and BBC News. Once connected to Wi-Fi, you can log in to all the apps easily, as well as download new ones from the Google Play Store.
In our time with the device, we found overall experience to be seamless and without any lags. The only that didn’t work was the EvoTV Store app, which repeatedly kept on crashing. We found it to be quite annoying that the device’s own app didn’t work properly, and hope Amkette fixes it soon via a software update.As for its highlight feature – 4K content, we’d say that the Amkette EvoTV 2 does a fairly decent job. Obviously the best experience is possible when the device is connected to a 4K TV, but content on Full HD TVs looks good too.
The EvoTV 2 4K Ultra HD is powered by a 1.6GHz ARM Cortex-A53 chipset, paired with 1GB of RAM. There’s also 8GB of internal storage, with support for microSD cards of 128GB in size. So you can install all the apps and store all content you want.

Built-in Miracast and AirPlay functionalities allow content to be wirelessly streamed to laptops and smartphones. These worked well during our testing. The remote control comes with regular navigation keys. Its advantage is that it lets you scroll through homescreen menu items without having to click the physical button. All you have to do is click on the mouse like logo on the remote control, and move your wrist toward the item on the screen that you’d like to select. Finally, click on the key with the arrow logo to confirm the menu selection.

Verdict

The future of entertainment and how we consume it is changing rapidly by the day. And if Amkette EvoTV 2 4K Ultra HD can bring digital content from diverse multiple sources like TV, computer and the internet together, we believe that it’s definitely worth the asking price of Rs 7,499. You get everything from 4K content support to wireless streaming functionality.

For those looking at alternatives, the Apple TV is a good choice, even if it’s slightly expensive.