EWEAT EW902 XBMC Android TV Box Review

Company introduction

Shenzhen Eweat Technology Co., Ltd is a high technology enterprise, with a factory located in Shenzhen, China specialized in designing/manufacturing/marketing android TV box and TV sticks. Their R&D team has many years of professional experience in video communication, digital audio, etc. In digital circuits, analog circuit technologies, optical components, whether hardware or software technology, acquiring extensive experience. For the past years, Eweat has focused on developing high-definition players in overseas markets.

Company products are exported to Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, with excellent expertise and attentive customer service they are providing high-quality products for end-users as well as OEM/ODM services for domestic and overseas customers.

EWEAT EW902 review will be focusing on the followings :

Products main selling points & Specifications
Company introduction.
Package.
Unpacking
items included in the package.
Accessories.
Design & Quality.
System.
Operation.
Video Playback
Benchmarks & Hardware info.
unboxing Video.
Conclusion.

Main Selling Points :

Aluminum Casing.
XBMC FULLY Loaded.
BD ISO playback Support.
X 1 External SATA Interface.
LAN: 10/100/1000 Ethernet
Support H.265 Video Decoding.
Support All known Video Containers.
Dual HDMI ports: HDMI in + HDMI out.
USB : X 1 USB 3.0 host + X 2 USB 2.0 host.
Audio : DTS , Dolby Digital ACS , Dolby Digital True HD.

Package

Unboxing

Items included in the package :

1x Power Adaptor (12V – 2000mA).
1x User Manual.
1x IR Remote Control.
1x HDMI Cable.
1x AV Cable.
1x Serial ATA Female to Female Data Power Extension Cable.
1x EW902 TV Box.

Accessories

IR Remote Control

The remote control unit is very easy to operate. Keys don’t feel stiff but soft upon pressing. For some reason, the company didn’t paint the numeric keys and the up/down buttons. Besides this minor problem, general build quality is high and doesn’t feel cheap.

Design & Quality

Build quality and casing design are superb, above-average quality. According to Eweat company, it’s completely made from aluminum material.

EW902 Full View

System

The EW902 Box runs Android 4.4.2 KitKat OS. With previously installed firmware movement between screens was pretty slow so I installed the latest one (20141030) that apparently solved the performance problem, But still, the firmware needs additional tweaking.

Firmware Updating Process

Download the firmware
Copy the file with the extension “IMG” within a USB memory
Turn off TV Box and connect the USB memory
Press the reset button and turn on the TV Box
The update information appears on the display
The update process takes about 3 minutes
The EW902 will automatically restart to complete the process.

( All Firmware’s including latest are available: Here )

The Realtek UI on the user experience side is very easy to handle and operate. UI resembles windows 8 tile style design interface.

Operation

one of the highlights about this box is its external SATA 2.0 hard drive interface. A very handy feature if you need to add extra storage space for multimedia content.

After connecting my 3.5″ 128GB SSD SATA 3.0 drive with SATA cable included in EW902 bundle, Total remaining free space remaining was approximate ~117GB (Note: including 5.64GB internal flash storage).

Storage & Space info ( Including SATA Hard Drive ).

HDMI IN Port

This feature is a relatively unique one implanted in newer generation Android TV boxes. With Standard TV boxes users had to switch between different HDMI TV ports, For example, HDM1 .. HDM2, etc. With the HDMI input option, you’re able instantly to witch to your TV signal within the android environment by clicking on the “HDMI Source In” icon located on the apps section. if you want to see it on Main UI, you just need to click on “Eject” button on the Remote control unit.

Testing HDMI IN with Various Cable TV Box Models :

Type Test: HDMI Video & Audio pass-through Test.
Location: Israel
Cable company: HOT

Test # 1

Cable TV Box Model / Brand Name: Hot Magic HD
Result: Video output resulted in a pink color picture.

Test # 2

Cable TV Box Model / Brand Name: Hot HD (THOMSON)
Result: Everything worked well.

Connections

Connections are quite simple. You need to connect the HDMI Out of the appliance, For example, Cable Box into the EW902 HDMI IN Port and an additional HDMI cable from the EW902 HDMI Out port should be connected straight to the TV.

Video Playback

Do with the fact that the Realtek 1195 chipset is new on the market, there yet to be any real hardware decoding support within the XBMC internal player. Current solution involves installing Eweat customized XBMC version based on built 14.0 Git that uses default OS media player. I hope that in the coming months XBMC team along with Realtek company will quickly resolve this issue.

XBMC FULLY Loaded

Eweat Special XBMC build include popular Sports, Movie, live TV and music streaming related Add-ons. As explained previously, For video playback XBMC uses Rtkplayer as the default player. Just as a note!, There are some live TV channels that are possible copyright restricted to specific geographic regions and therefore maybe will not work well in specific locations.

Benchmarks & Hardware info

CPU – Z

Device CPU clock speed ranges from 719 MHz in idle mode up to 1.10 GHz at peak speed. Box performance was ok, But Firmware still needs extra tweaking and improvements.

AnTuTu Benchmark

EWEAT EW902 Unboxing

Conclusion

High-quality product at a very affordable price. if you’re looking for a TV box with better “juice power”, especially for gaming purposes that also fully supports XBMC I recommend checking the EW802 quad-core model that’s equipped with a Mali-450MP GPU ( Octa Core ).

PROS