A1 Box Android.
A good thing in a small package? “Witchcraft!” screams Desire Athrow, before calming down and having a nice cuppa once he knows it has Netflix.
Are these low-cost Chinese Android boxes everything they’re cracked up to be? Costing just a couple of ponies, we test drive one of the latest models.
The Beelink A1 is sold as a TV box, as the name indicates, but is just as useful – if not more – as a thin client, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses that may want to move away from “other” more expensive and complicated options.
The A1 is absolutely tiny and will comfortably sit in an adult hand. Its dimensions (77x77x17mm) will enable you to tuck it away almost anywhere, but the lack of a VESA mount means that you won’t be able to fix it securely to the back of a monitor.
Bearing in mind that this is a sub£70 box, we were surprised to find that it had 4GB of RAM (albeit DDR3) installed in its miniscule case. This is something that will definitely be helpful for future versions of Android, or if you intend to use it to run more memory-hungry applications.
Beelink opted for a quad-core processor – a Rockchip RK3328 – clocked at up to 1.5GHz. It supports 4K at 60Hz, H.265 and VP9 formats as well. The choice of the Mali-450MP2 remains unexplained, though. This is a GPU that’s nearly six years old, and doesn’t come with architectural improvements that can be found on later models.
The small storage capacity (16GB) is probably the only worry, although the presence of a microSD card slot mitigates our concerns to a certain degree. Note that the thin client also sports 802.11ac Wi-Fi connectivity and older Bluetooth 4.0.
As is usually the case the, A1 is powered by a 5V2A (10W) power supply unit with an annoying proprietary connector. MicroUSB adaptors are always the preference.
Performance
Power it on and you’re ready to go. You land on a standard grid homepage that resembles a dashboard. Unfortunately, the configuration options are limited. There’s a handful of applications: a memory cleaner, media player, file explorer, music player and a proprietary app store. Google Play is present, but YouTube or any other Google apps are notable by their absence.
Don’t expect the A1 to be a pacey roadrunner. It will be fine with mundane and office productivity tasks, but anything remotely taxing is likely to bring this system to its petit knees, especially games.
Having a poor video subsystem means that benchmark results for graphical tests were far below what we’d expect, with the A1 scoring zero frames per second on Antutu’s demanding 3D Marooned test. For reference, it hit 2,670 overall on Passmark with 44,726 on the Passmark CPU test. And it scored a multi-core Geekbench result of 1,390.
This small-format space is crammed with competition. The A5X MAX is a touch cheaper and offers four USB ports. The MX9 Pro has an external antenna, twice the amount of storage, albeit just one USB port, but is £50. While the distinctive circular R-TV R10 has a similar specification but with twice the storage.
There’s a lot to like about the Beelink A1 and anyone who has an Android smartphone will immediately feel at home with it. Our two complaints are the on-board storage is on the stingy side – adding a microSD card should alleviate that deficiency – the other is the aging GPU.
As we’ve noted, there are other solid alternatives in the same ballpark price bracket. Choosing the right model for you will ultimately come down to your budget and priorities.