Pivos XIOS DS Media Play! Android Media Player Review

To give you a little taste of the performance of the XIOS DS Media Play! we ran the Antutu, Geekbench 2 and 3DMark benchmarks and made up some graphs comparing it to a range of other Android devices.

In Antutu we ran the CPU integer and CPU float point tests, followed by 2D and 3D graphics tests to give you some kind of idea about where the performance of this device lays.

In Geekbench 2 we ran the full test that does CPU integer, CPU floating point, memory performance and memory bandwidth before giving you a total score.

In 3DMark we ran the performance Ice Storm benchmark, we didn’t bother with the extreme because this device is not capable or intended for that type of test.

Video Performance

As you can see from the graphs the Pivos XIOS DS compares with a Tegra 2 smartphone on the GPU front and is about 40% behind Tegra 2 on the CPU front. Yet what does this actually translate into in real world performance? Well from my experience with the device within Android ICS 1080p playback is good and between firmware revisions you can see a noticeable difference in 1080p performance in terms of gradually less lag and stuttering.

There is some stuttering and lag at times but it is rare and the firmware updates have stamped it out a fair bit. Though the weak CPU is reflected in the fact that applications take a long time to load and the boot process is a little on the slow side too. But this device is low powered and once you are booted in you can just leave it on as it only consumes around 4-6 watts active and next to nothing when idle or in standby. I would say as an Android media player the XIOS DS is close to fault less but it could benefit from an extra CPU core because you do notice the 1GHz single core Cortex A9 holding you back at times.

XBMC Performance

The XBMC performance is generally good and it can tackle all media formats in relative comfort. I don’t want to delve too much into the XBMC platform here because we are reviewing the XIOS DS not XBMC. 1080p playback is still the benchmark by which to judge most media players and the XIOS DS didn’t pass 100%, but it did an admirable job. Of the 1080p clips I watched through various formats and through varios add-ons I found it to be a luck of the draw. I would say around 80% played fine without a hitch, the other 15% experienced minor stuttering and lag and I had a few 1080p clips which were unwatchable.

Using XBMC I found it to be buggy and some add-ons for XBMC were very laggy which is despite the XIOS DS being the “official platform of XBMC”. pPayback was certainly not as smooth as within Android and I get the impression from the Pivos forums that running XBMC as a standalone OS is better than running it as an “on-top-of-Android” feature which is how it comes pre-installed. This is because running it on top of Android slows it down as it has to run more than it needs too. If you are only buying this device for the XBMC then I definitely think looking at the standalone XBMC option is worthwhile to get the most out of the XIOS DS.

General Android Performance

Using the XBMC to browse  the internet or use Android more generally is difficult with the remote and I would say you NEED a keyboard and mouse to do this effectively. If anything the remote is mainly for using XBMC because it works really well at that, though it doesn’t really work well in Android. I found the remote to be weak, that is the Infrared sensor doesn’t hold its range that well and you need a clear path otherwise the signal is easily blocked.

General Android performance was fast and smooth, the only minor hitch was that internet browsing was quite slow.More broadly with the general Android performance of the XIOS DS I found issues with the CPU being easily overloaded and this occasionally caused certain apps to crash. Although generally speaking if you aren’t trying to do too many things at once the XIOS DS is very stable this is why it is meant for media content streaming and not as a tablet/smartphone/PC replacement. It is perfectly capable of running singular media tasks like video streaming and 1080p playback without a hitch.

A final issue I has was with the Wi-Fi performance. Given how well other Wi-Fi connected devices perform in my house, the relative performance of the XIOS DS was a bit sluggish. From the forums I got the impression that the antenna was badly placed so I took it apart and moved the antenna round using this guide and it gave a noticeable boost to performance.