“Smart TV”, or in its popular spelling, SmartTV, is something that the leading LCD and plasma manufacturers seem to be emphasising pretty heavily lately, in parallel with the omnipresent 3D technology. Depending on the particular manufacturer, SmartTV entails (wireless) internet and LAN capabilities, playback of a large number of video and audio formats, as well as images, the presence of at least one USB port, and the capability of installing applications from the manufacturer’s online store/database.
All this is more than attractive if you’re buying a new TV at present time, but if you already have an old one (which might not be that old at all), the choice of options can get rather confusing. SmartTV devices (“boxes”) are available as standalone versions too, offering much of the feature spectrum found in the latest TV sets.
We presented you the first such device to come to our office, LG’s ST600 SmartTV Upgrader, not long ago; as it turned out, the device in question set the bar pretty high as far as this device type is concerned. ASUS has joined the race too, presenting very competitive digital media players from its O!Play family for a while now. The smallest representative of this family is the Mini model, recently “upgraded” to Mini Plus in its latest rendition.
Hardware
Although it may appear that Mini Plus is a direct heir to the Mini model, this isn’t quite accurate. ASUS has decided to keep both devices entirely present on the market, with regard to their difference in both hardware and price. Mini Plus shares the casing with its older brother, but it now has a different glossy relief design on top, similar to that seen on ASUS’ high-end N-series routers. The front of the device contains a USB port and a 4-in-1 card reader, which is an excellent solution, as the user doesn’t need to move the device to reach the ports.
The back has power, LAN, eSATA/USB, HDMI connectors and analogue + digital audio outputs. The presence of a gigabit LAN port, as well as the wireless N stardard, is the main hardware difference compared to Mini. We installed the latest firmware, v2, prior to testing the device, and it really brings a tangible difference to the user experience, offering content from services such as Facebook, YouTube Leanback and Dailymotion. Furthermore, the new firmware also rectifies some issues identified in the behaviour of the gigabit LAN port.
What everyone is likely to ask first is – is this wireless N device capable of displaying full HD with no cables involved? Most definitely so. As long as Wi-Fi is working correctly and you’re getting a signal four bars strong, not even 20 Mbps HD content can’t pose a serious threat to video quality, with stuttering happening on extremely rare occasions. However, we’ve established that Mini Plus’ Wi-Fi module simply doesn’t work very well if any agility at all is required. The list of issues is long: from connections with ridiculously low speeds (1 Mbps), over extremely irritating loss of connection, to self-imposed module shutdown. We’ve tracked the problem down to the device itself, rather than our own N router, as we changed both router models and device-to-device distances, but to no availability.
Things aren’t ideal even with the gigabit wired network. It happens every so often that the device simply registers a connection of 10-15 Mbps when playing a video, which means that you can forget about fluent 10+ Mbps HD content in that situation. This brings us to the main flaw of this device according to us – the impossibility to monitor network connections. At no time will the device notify you of the speed it’s using to access your home network (except when playing a video over it directly), not even whether it’s still connected or with a dropped connection. The only way to establish whether O!Play Mini Plus is actively connected to a network is to go to device settings (network menu).
