[Update: Egreat A9 unboxing]

A couple of days ago we revealed the imminent launch at CES 2015 of the Egreat A9 unit, powered by Mstar MSO9180D1R.
This particular chipset is not new, several units were launched in China last year, but never quite took off overseas.
But this is about to change, as several devices were announced, and some are quite interesting:

	Egreat A9 Powerful Mini PC. Egreat announced a partnership with Vidon, making the device even more interesting.
	Zidoo X9 Good looking case, (so far) regular firmware updates, custom UI interface. Very promising device.
	Xtreamer Prodigy 4K Another good looking case. Internal HDD slot.
	Kaiboer F5 One of the first Mini PC’s to use this chipset. Little to no availability outside China.
	UYESEE T1H Less attractive case, unknown availability.

So, which one you should choose?
Here’s a side by side comparison between the most popular Mstar MSO9180D1R Mini PC’s:

	Egreat A9	Zidoo X9	Xtreamer Prodigy 4K	Kaiboer F5
Case	metal	metal	metal	metal
RAM	2GB	2GB	2GB	2GB
Memory	16GB	8GB	8GB	8GB
Ethernet	Gigabit	Gigabit	Gigabit	Gigabit
Wi-fi	Dual Band	Dual Band	802.11 b/g/n	Dual Band
Bluetooth	4.0	4.0	-?	yes
USB 2.0	3	2	2	2
USB 3.0	1	1	1	1
HDD Tray	yes, 3.5”	no	yes, 3.5”	no
HDD fan	yes	–	no	–
HDMI-In	yes, with PVR	yes	yes, with PVR	yes
Other	– VFD – Touchpanel – custom UI /EG-UI – Vidon.me partner	– VFD – custom Zidoo UI	– Xtreamer gui v.7

[Update] – list of Mstar MSO9180 Mini PC’s as of January 2015

As said before, May is an interesting month.
Here’s what I’ve learned today:
3 manufacturers are now preparing android TV boxes based on not-so-known Mstar MSO9180 chipset.
Features:

– Quad core, Arm Cortex A9, 1.5Ghz
– Mali 450MP4
– up to 4 GB of RAM
– 4K/2K (up to 4096×[email protected])
– NAND or eMMC
– Gigabit ethernet
– USB 2.0 and 3.0

There’s also a Mstar MSO9180-DB2 version, used by Egreat A9, which can support 7.1 RAW audio passthrough.