Noontec A9 Smart TV Box Review

The unit comes pre-installed with Android 2.3 (codenamed Gingerbread) to give fantastic functionality from the offset. Now I’m an iOS kinda guy myself but I’m not one of those people who will complain and slate Android until I’m blue in the face. I believe in credit where credit is due and Android 2.3 is a good operating system, though maybe not as good as iOS, but that’s just my opinion, so let’s leave it at that.

While we won’t be delving to much into the software as an Android operating system, we do want to comment on the preinstalled applications and the overall performance of how smooth playback and general usage is.

The main screen when the unit is booted up resembles what we’ve seen from other Android 2.3 based devices, such as phones and of course the ever so popular tablets. The bottom of the screen shows the most typical used shortcuts and the top right displays the time, volume control and network connectivity.

When clicking on the menu button towards the right of the screen, we are shown the various applications that come supplied on the A9 though the Android Market is on hand for those of you wanting your favourite Android applications ready to go at the click of a button.

Video playback is easy to use with a simple brown and play function that allows a variety of different media types to be played from a storage device that can connect via USB or via memory card using the built in card reader. All of the latest file formats are able to be played including MKV, AVI, MP4, XVID, VOB and much more.

When looking at MKV 1080p playback we found that no stutter was present, nor any form of lag either. The playback was fluid and showed that the A9 was perfectly capable of running this high-definition video.

Music playback is very similar with a simple browser that allows you to play any music based files from an external storage device, with the added ability to create playlists. Each song can be played individually or by browsing through a specific artist and added to the various playlists that you create.

You can even browse via album name if that’s your preference.

Or if you just have a certain song in your head that you want to browse for, you can do this easily too.

Once playing, you’ll find sufficient information about the song including artist name, album title and the individual track name.

Photo browsing is of similar ease with a yet again simple browser, allowing you to flick through your cherished memories with a click of a button, though be warned if you have a large photo collection, as you may expect it can take a while to load the thumbnails. The various albums within your gallery are shown in quite a unique way which can only be explained as a stack of photos.

Once you delve further in to a photo album you’ll be greeted with the various photos that are included in that album. Be warned, as before, that it can take a while for the photos to individually render but we were using quite large 4MB + large JPG photos taken directly on a Canon EOS 550d camera.

Once you find your chosen photo, you can simply navigate to it and open it up, which once again make take a few moments to render, but once rendered it will show and give you the ability to zoom and also scroll through the other photos in that particular album.

General usage including the web browser is ample, though not as fast as a normal desktop PC but that is to be expected when comparing a unit of this size and specification to an extreme powerhouse rig like I currently use. It’s not slow by all means, but could take a while to adjust to the speed and fluidness of how things interact and that’s not the devices fault, but more of a user based error on my behalf, but it may just be me.

The ability to use the wireless keyboard/trackpad combo is a real godsend and is very responsive and easy to use when navigating through the web browser among other sides of the operating system. There is little to no lag between the device and the keyboard and a variety of functions that the keyboard can do from a unit that is so small.