Amkette EvoTV Review

Over the past few years, technology in televisions has expanded vastly and what was previously essentially a video playing device, has now evolved into being a multi-faceted device, allowing you to do so much more - streaming content off the Internet, playing games using apps, video chat and the list goes on and on. However, a television is a system that cannot be updated regularly like you would do a smartphone and hence many of us tend to have older HDTV sets with basic functionality, such as just being HDMI compliant without smart TV features. That’s where brands like Amkette come in and they have now launched media players that bring smart TV capabilities to HDTVs. Amkette recently unveiled the EvoTV in India that runs on Google’s Android operating system, thereby expanding the usability of your television making it an even smarter TV. Read on to know if this device will benefit your television experience or not.

Minimalistic in appearance

Design and Build Quility
HDTV sets are generally rather big and may take up quite a sizable amount of space in your home. So keeping this in mind, Amkette has designed the EvoTV in an extremely small frame that can complement the look and feel of your home. This EvoTV is finished in a combination of matte and glossy black, which means it can suit practically all homes. The size of the box is not that big, as touched upon earlier and is slightly larger than a coaster. The design team's done a brilliant job and made it measure a mere inch in height.

The brand has added a range of connectivity options at the sides, allowing one to pair up to four USB drives with the EvoTV. Apart from these slots, the other connectivity options featured here include ports for an SD card, SPDIF, HDMI, AV, Ethernet and one for connecting the charging cable. This device looks quite classy and Amkette has done good in giving it a minimalistic look. While the look of the player can be mentioned as one of its main features, it is only the tip of the iceberg.

A range of ports at the side

Amkette have also added a remote control with this player, which is an integral part of using the EvoTV. The remote has a matte black finish, which means it can resist fingerprint residue to quite a large extent and has only a few buttons which are well-spaced. The remote has a touch sensitive button at the back, which allows you to use the remote like a mouse on the TV. The overall build quality of the remote control is great, except for the button at the back which feels a bit cheap in comparison to the rest of the unit.

Features
Though it can be argued that the design is enough to warrant a purchase, the EvoTV comes equipped with a range of features that can surely keep you hooked to your television. The EvoTV runs on Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread and the processor found here is an ARMv7 processor that features a CPU frequency of 200.0 - 750.0MHz. Amkette has used a Mali 400 GPU, which takes care of the graphics on this Android-powered player. The brand has added 4GB of internal storage on this device and have used 512 MB RAM.

While the technical specifications may be decent enough to render content, it is the device’s capabilities that make it a truly exciting player. If you have a standard flat panel HDTV, there is a high possibility that it is devoid of any smart TV capabilities. With this system connected to it using the supplied HDMI cable and a Wi-Fi connection, you can have all the features that are found on your smartphone or tablet blown up on the large screen of your TV.

Homescreen

The interface of the EvoTV is easy to navigate through and with the help of the remote, your television can be used in the same fashion as you use an Android powered smartphone. The scaling of the layout is really good and the text appears crisp across all areas of the screen. You have the ability to edit the way you view the homescreen by adding or removing widgets based on your preference. The widgets on the main screen are placed in blocks that are arranged by the category they fall under. For instance, there are dedicated sections for apps, games, media, Web, YouTube Viewer, etc. By having these sections on the interface, it becomes a convenient way to easily choose your favourite application directly from the homescreen. This feature is similar to that of Android devices.

The Amkette EvoTV supports FAT32 as well as NTFS drives and this helps you to easily expand upon the storage capabilities. There is another convenience in this as you can playback videos stored on your portable hard drive as well as the EvoTV can read a range of file formats. The supported formats, include AVI, MKV, MP4, MOV, 3GP, 3GPP, FLC and a whole range of others as well. 

EvoTV Store

Another handy feature of this media player is that you can see the weather as well and it gives you the forecast of the next five days’ weather, along with wind speed, pressure, humidity, time of sunrise and sunset. This allows you to have the convenience of viewing the weather without having to wait for the weather to flash on a local news channel. If you have a webcam attached to your television, then you can use Skype as well. If you do not have a mic, then you need not worry as this remote control also comes with this capability.

Summing up this section of the review, we can safely say that this EvoTV set can expand upon the features of your flat panel TV or even your smart TV.