It was a fine evening when my eyes caught this little nice gadget in Walmart. Didn’t plan to buy this. Heck I didn’t even know it exists. A quick browsing and I found out this product was originally a kickstarter project, but now it’s available in retail.

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Equiso Streaming Smart Stick is a device capable to turn our TV into an Android tablet. Interesting concept, isn’t it? The “stick” itself is basically look like a USB flash drive, but the connection is HDMI instead of USB. It plugs directly to HDMI port in our TV, but it needs “power” provided from USB to microUSB cable (included). My TV also has a USB plug, so I connect it there, and it works.

Equiso’s remote is rather interesting. Both sides of the remote are useful. The first side has some basic buttons like navigation arrows, select, menu, etc. The second side is actually a qwerty keyboard. This replaces the need to have on-screen keyboard. Not impressed yet? The remote has accelerometer so it can detect movements. As results, we can see a pointer on TV screen and we can move the pointer by moving our remote. A bit like Wii remote, I guess.

Out of the box, we can immediately see the Equiso stick and its remote. The remote needs to be charged from time to time, the stick gets power from microUSB while being used. The first time I tried to plug this nice little thing into a TV, it worked immediately, showing some sort of startup loading screen with Equiso logo. My Equiso unit runs Android 4.0.3 (ICS), has 8GB storage, expandable with micro SD card slot. It has built-in WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, a micro USB plug (for power) and a full-sized USB slot. Strangely, something is attached in its full-sized USB slot. According to the manual book, it’s a remote receiver (RF wireless receiver). So I guess the USB slot is not usable. But I might try later whether I can put USB hub on it to connect some external HDD or something.

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The processor of this smart stick is a dual-core 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex A9. It has 1 GB RAM. The on/off toggle button uses infrared (the most common standard for remotes), but all other buttons uses RF signal. This allows us to plug Equiso on the back of our TV, and the remote will work just fine even it doesn’t have direct access to the receiver (better than infrared). More about its specs, you might want to read it directly from http://equiso.com/specs/

I have decided long ago that Android and iOS has their own strengths and weaknesses. Though Android is not a bad product, I have concluded that Android is not for my specific style of usage. Then why did I end up purchasing yet another Android device? Because this one is unique enough to trigger my curiosity, and the price is only $80, worth experimenting.

If I simply need a tablet, I can just carry my iPad mini everywhere, and I’m very happy with it. However, this smart stick should enable me to watch movie in large screen during my trips. Most hotels provide a TV, and most TV has HDMI slot nowadays. Just plug in Equiso and I can watch my own movies everywhere, that would be awesome.

Another usage I could think of, is that I can directly plug in Equiso to a projector for a presentation. It’s Android, so I can just use Kingsoft Office and open my presentation there. Or, I can even work on any Word/Excel/Powerpoint document at night in hotel room, in large screen, should be a lot better experience than any tablet screen size (but I don’t need to carry around that extra weight of large screen devices).

Now let’s talk about the device’s performance. It is… decent. It takes time to get used to the control system using the remote, but certainly usable. I can sign in using my Google ID and download some apps from Google Play. This device is recognized as a tablet in Goggle Play. Based on its spec, you get the speed and performance you would expect from any low-to-mid level of Android device. Yes I can stream movies using YouTube app. I can watch my own movies using MX Player. I can even stream my anime movies (H264 10-bit) from my Mac using VLC Streamer. It’s usable and watchable, but… I don’t feel that kind of sophisticated feeling like when I first use AppleTV. Occasional glitches are noticeable. Sometimes app would quit itself, just like my usual experience with any Android device.

Despite its imperfection, I’m still quite happy with this purchase. My main goal works (editing Office files, opening presentations, watching movies), and I can deal with few random quits when necessary. Maybe my tolerance rate for this device is high because I will use Equiso mainly for trips, not for everyday gadget.