New U2 Box with S905X3 SoC and Android 9.1 as a novelty

Today we find on Aliexpress.com a new cheap range Chinese Box with the interesting SoC of Amlogic S905X3 that surprises us for including Android 9.1 as OS since until now we have only seen Android 9.0 in this SoC.

We will see if we have any noticeable improvement with this update but we doubt it and less in a box of the cheap range that have very little work on the ROMs. The specifications of this Box are part of what we find within its price that make this a basic TV-Box to be used as a 4K media player with KODI-type apps or even for games or streaming on paid platforms, although only in basic quality.

SoC, RAM and storage

The TV-Box U2 includes the AMlogic S905X3 SoC, a Quad Core manufactured in 12nm that reaches up to 1.9 GHz speed and integrates a Mali-G31 MP2 GPU. This SoC has four ARM Cortex-A55 CPU cores and also an NPU for iA, you can see the power of this SoC in a comparative article of the S905X3. The VPU is an Amlogic Video Engine 10 with optional HDR Dolby Vision, HDR10 +, HDR10 and HLG support. This Smart Box is available in versions with 4 GB of DDR3 RAM and 32GB of eMMc storage memory that can be expanded from its microSD card reader that we find on the side of its plastic box.

Other specs

The U2 has network connectivity with Dual Band Wifi, Bluetooth 4.1 and a RJ-45 Gigabit network connector. The connectors in the box are the usual ones with a USB 2.0 port, another USB 3.0 port, SPDIF audio output, an HDMI 2.0a video output and an analog audio and video output jack.

The operating system is Android 9.1 (sure a 9.0 non official custom version) and a basic IR remote control is included in the basic pack although we have the option to buy it with all kinds of extra controls even with a microphone included.