Amkette launches Evo TV media hub in India for Rs 10k

Amkette is a company most of associate with rewritable disks, but today the company launched a new product called the Evo TV which is an Android powered media hub. The company has priced the product at a MRP of Rs 12,995, but says the street price will be around Rs 9,995.

The Evo TV is an evolution of the company’s previously launched Flash TV media hub. It runs on a forked version of Android 2.3, which has been optimized to for TV use and also provides access to the Google Play market. Amekette says that it has designed the product to smarten televisions out there in the market.
For this, the Evo TV does not only provide the standard media hub functionality which provides the ability to connect and play a plethora of video content in a variety of formats but also adds Smart TV like functionality.
Some of the Smart TV features include a Web Browser, a video streaming app which offers a curated selection of India centric content from YouTube, the ability to run Android apps, and a UI which gets constantly updated by various news sources.
The whole UI of the Evo TV has been designed for the TV, and is bifurcated into a number views which are more or less like giant folders, which can be customized according to the users whims and facies. In these views, a user can fill up apps, web links and so forth.
The Evo TV also comes with a preloaded Skype app for video chat capabilities.
For the navigation of the UI, Amkette has come up with a very usable remote, which the company calls the Evo Touch Remote. The remote houses a  gyroscope, an accelerometer and a microphone. Users can control the UI via a curser that works through the remote which uses a Wiimote like gesture controls that spring to life once the user touches the capacitive key on the bottom of the remote. Once the user touches the capacitive touch key, one can control the UI at even try extremely short throws. We tested this, UI and admittedly it worked much more intuitively that other smart TV interfaces we have seen till date.
Coming back to the specs, the Amkette Evo TV is actually a pretty powerful kit and runs an ARM Cortex A9 processor CPU and an ARM Mali 400 GPU, which is the same one used in the Samsung Galaxy S II. Additionally, the device has 4GB of internal storage, built-in Wi-Fi and ethernet, 4 USB ports, support for 1080p video, support for 7.1 surround sound audio, support for 3G dongles, a singular HDMI port, and DLNA.
Furthermore, for typing one can either use the gesture control to control the on screen keyboard or one can connect a host of USB or Wireless keyboards with the device.