Introduction
AC Ryan Veolo Smart Android Hub for your TV
The past couple of years surely have been big for TV media players, small little boxes that allow you to stream media content over your network. You can play the latest music from your PC, watch a movie over your NAS and even stream YouTube content over the web.
There's lots of this gear in the 100 to 200 EUR market, available from many brands, some bad, some reasonable some extraordinary good. AC Ryan is such a company, originally that company specialized in FANS and colorful LED lit upgrades for your customized PC, A.C. Ryan. They bored into a new market roughly a year and a half ago with a new marketing team, and that brought along good success.
The First generation Playon!HD series was reasonably good, the new series 2 with the new version 2.0 GUI is sincerely good, to date I use one of these units myself.
But the market is continuously changing though, the biggest trend last year was tablets, Android entered the market and that certainly changed the balance of smart phones. The concept proves that you can do a lot of stuff with very little hardware, yet it remains intuitive.
With that concept in mind AC Ryan started developing a new media hub slash player, in fact I shouldn't call it a media-player really as it is much more than that. The end product is called the Veolo.
The Veolo is AC Ryan's version of a media 'HUB' powered by Android 2.2 (Froyo).
Being based on Android you are obviously freed from a somewhat sluggish Realtek chip and software. Next to that the Android platform offers TV functions including a full Web browser with support for Flash and even HTML5.
With Android comes downloadable apps, widgets from the 'AndroidPIT' app center and heck, even Android games could run. That's right, Angry Birds in 1080P !
The hardware side of things doesn't suck either, you'll notice features like Gigabit Ethernet and (included) Wireless-N connectivity. Meanwhile a 1GHz processor (ARM Cortex-A9 ) and 512MB RAM pledge fast functionality. There are two USB ports and an SDHC slot available too, to add extra storage. No embedded HDD though, this really is intended to be a streaming media device.
These high-speed interfaces should provide smoother 1080p MKV movie playback via an HDMI output. What makes this kit special is the included 3-in-1 remote control, as it acts as a wireless motion controller, keyboard and mouse for easier text input and navigation. You'll literally be pointing towards your telly as if it was a touch-screen.
With all that in mind you'd almost forget this is a fully fetched media-player, able of playing even the highest bit rate 1080P content, including MKV containers, WMVHD, H.264 ... well pretty much everything.
But will it be worth 200 EUR ? Let's find out and head onwards into the review shall we ?
