Android TV has seen a bit of resurgence in the last year or so. The platform continues to get new features as a possible rebrand to "Google TV" may be in the works. There has also been an influx in new hardware with products from Realme, TiVo, TCL, and NVIDIA, just to name a few. Xiaomi is a company that has also been in the Android TV game for a while, and they're now teasing a new addition to their lineup: the Mi TV streaming stick.
Xiaomi has released a few different Android TV devices in the past. The company has 4K televisions with Android TV built-in ranging from 65-inches to 43-inches in size. The Xiaomi Mi Box, however, is a more traditional Android TV set-top box offering, and it has been around for several generations. Now, the company is teasing a new form factor: a streaming stick.
The Xiaomi Mi TV first appeared on Gearbest a couple of weeks ago, though we were initially skeptical of the veracity of its information. However, it seems that listing may have been legitimate. Today, during an online event, a Xiaomi official showed off an image of the Mi TV stick (at 27:58 in this video). From the image, we can see a remote and a sleek dongle. The remote has a Google Assistant button along with buttons for Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
Going back to the Gearbest listing, we can see many of the specifications for the upcoming Xiaomi Mi TV stick. In a nutshell, it's a dongle version of the Xiaomi Mi Box S. The Mi TV stick may have an Amlogic S905 Y2 quad-core chip, a Mali-G31 GPU, 2GB of DDR4 RAM, and 8GB of storage. It will apparently ship with Android TV based on Android 9 Pie, DTS-HD audio support, Dolby Stereo Sound, and "High Clarity 4K HDR." The connector for the dongle is HDMI 2.0.
The Xiaomi Mi TV stick is listed at $79 on Gearbest, but it's best to not put too much merit in that pricing yet. That price would make the dongle more expensive than the similarly equipped Mi Box S which cost $59 at launch. We should see an official launch sometime soon.
Via 1: WinFuture | Via 2: 9to5Google