Equiso Smart TV

Stay away from this product is my advice, here is why. I backed this project on kickstarter, as it looked pretty good. When i received the product, i opened the box only to find the micro usb port in the remote had fallen out! Very cheap construction on the unit itself, and the remote. When i plugged in the unit to my TV, it would not connect to my wireless network. When i tried pressing the flimsy reset button on the side, it wasnt doing anything. It then became recessed into the unit, at which point i used a little screwdriver to push it. It stiill did nothing to reset the unit. Troubleshooting with them was a joke, and i was told to send it back. Once they received it, i got a couple of snarky emails asking me why there were marks on the reset button, which i explained to them. After 2 or 3 weeks, they finally emailed me to say that it was my fault, and they were not going to replace the unit. They offered me to purchase another unit from them! Needless to say, i was less than thrilled with their proposition.

I would like to save you all for making a horrible mistake in purchasing this product. I'm one of the original backers and it doesn't do nearly half of what they said it was going to.

The remote is cheaply made and I feel like I'm breaking it every time I use it.

The unit cannot use Plex even though they said it was going to be integrated. They do claim they will fix this in an upcoming software update...You know, the one we were supposed to get when we use it for the first time that now after almost a month is still not to be seen. (They did release a beta update but I can't tell a lick of difference)

YouTube works but you can't log in to it so you can't view your subscriptions. I couldn't care less about playing Angry Birds on this thing and that is hardly anything to use as a benchmark as just about any smartphone can play it. (Even the Nook Touch eBook reader can play it!)

Do yourself a favor and check out the comments on their kickstarter page. I'm not sure what the people who gave this thing a 5 star review were using but it likely is not the Equiso. (Either that or they work for Equiso)

Very dissatisfied with this thing and I would return it if I could.

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Product is great on paper, and some of the features are really good. But there are too many negatives, and the resulting product is a waste of money.

Good:

Remote/Keyboard is a great item. The gyroscopic movement is precise and easy to use. The keyboard is a bit stiff (the buttons are loud), but overall worked well.

Great for quickly setting up a TV to display a web page or Powerpoint slide deck.

Con:

Very poor/spotty wireless connectivity. I have 20 Mbps download on my wireless network using my laptop (that is sitting next to my TV). Equiso will barely break 1 Mbps. The result is you cannot watch high resolution videos that are streaming.

Slow processor. The hardware cannot run Plants vs. Zombies or Jetpack Joyride. The framerate drops off a cliff and no amount of tweaking options/settings will get the games to be playable.

Applications crash. The Android-native apps for Youtube, Hulu, and Pandora crash with too much frequency to be useful. Numerous other applications will display a "application not responding" error, but sometimes they recover without crashing.

Overall: Great concept but poor execution. Wait until the technology catches up so the promise of features can be delivered. Equiso aims high but misses the mark.

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I can't even give these away to my friends as they are unstable and build quality isn't great.

One of the Standard's USB ports fell off and if you search the EquisoForums you'll see Im not the only one. The Standards are plagues with wait/close popups and extreme lag. Even with root access, custom build.prop, speed tweaks it still runs horrible. The built-in WiFi is horrible so I had to use a USB Ethernet adapter but this kind of defeats the point of having such a portable device if I have to carry my USB AC Power adapter, USB Hub, USB Ethernet adapter, etc.

The Pro's on the other hand aren't laggy but thanks to the dual cores they run decent. The major gripe with the Pro's are they can't stream Netflix or Live Feeds across the Internet without major pixelation. Looks similar to 8bit resolution on a old PC.

Software updates:

Standard got a beta but it was pieces the community hacked up and they rolled it up into a update.zip file.

Pro Well, still haven't received anything.

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I got the standard version through kickstarter as it sounded like a great idea but when I eventually received the product it had taken so long that there were other products with better specs at around the same price if not cheaper.

Also the software on it is so buggy i could barely do the some things I wanted to do with it and other things I just plain couldn't do.

There are constant popups saying the application is not responding(wich you never see in any of the demonstration videos) which leads me to believe the device is underpowered for what its being asked to do, which leads me to why its bordering on a scam it was advertised as having a 1Ghz CPU when in fact the CPU is running at 800Mhz which they say is to keep the temperature down yet mine is still overheating even at a lower speed than it was advertised as running at.

When I informed them I was unhappy with the product and wanted a refund they simply said they are sorry Im unhappy with the product and left it at that.

So I am writing this review to give all fair warning that this is not a product to invest in and there are plenty of other products leaps and bounds better than this for around the same price point.

I hope this review saves others the disappointment it has caused me.