Xiaomi’s new 4k streamer costs less than a pizza and wipes the floor with $100 boxes
Forty-two euros. That’s what Xiaomi is charging for a palm-sized slab that turns any crusty old HDMI port into a Dolby Vision, Wi-Fi 6, Atmos-ready cinema rig. The third-gen TV Box S hit AliExpress this week with a coupon code that feels like a typo—until you realize the specs sheet belongs on devices three times the price.
Inside the plastic lie tiny chips that embarrass last year’s flagships
Pop the lid and you’ll find a quad-core A55 cluster married to a Mali-G31 MP2 GPU. Translation: menus snap open faster than Netflix can ask “Who’s watching?” 2 GB of RAM keeps eight apps breathing in the background while 32 GB of eMMC gives Kodi, RetroArch and a half-dozen VPN clients room to stretch. Compare that to the 8 GB coffins most budget dongles ship with and you understand why Android TV suddenly feels like a premium OS instead of a laggy afterthought.
The wireless stack is where Xiaomi really twists the knife. Wi-Fi 6 pulls 1.2 Gbps real-world throughput in my apartment—enough to stream a 77 GB remux of Dune from a Plex server three rooms away without a single dropped frame. Bluetooth 5.2 pairs with PlayStation controllers for cloud gaming, or with a pair of Sonos speakers if you prefer your explosions wireless.
Colors that burn and blacks that swallow light
Dolby Vision plus HDR10+ is not marketing glitter here. Watching Stranger Things 4 on a mid-range TCL, the Upside Down’s crimson mist actually looks crimson—not the washed-out ketchup cheaper streamers paint. The secret is dynamic metadata that rewrites gamma frame-by-frame; Xiaomi licenses the real deal, not the HDR10 wrapper competitors rebrand as “HDR+” and hope nobody notices.
Audio gets the same non-scam treatment. Dolby Atmos over HDMI triggers my soundbar’s height channels, so helicopters in Top Gun: Maverick streak from ceiling to sofa. Try that on a Chromecast with Google TV and you’ll discover Google caps audio at Dolby Digital+—fine for sitcoms, pathetic for blockbusters.
Google tv finally stops screaming “recommendation” in your face
The new homescreen is still Google TV, but Xiaomi’s firmware strip turns off auto-playing trailers and buries the ads two clicks deeper. Long-press the mic button and you can string commands like “Play the latest episode of Silo and dim the living-room lights” without invoking three separate apps. The remote itself is Bluetooth, so line-of-sight tantrums are dead; IR is still there if you need to bully a 2014 Samsung dumb panel.
Storage anxiety? Gone. I sideloaded 24 apps—Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max, Kodi, Stremio, Tivimate—and still had 19 GB free. Adoptable storage via USB-C lets you marry a 256 GB thumb drive if you insist on hoarding 4K rips.
Why rivals aren’t even trying to match the price
Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K Max sells for €65 and ships with ads you can’t disable. Nvidia Shield is €200 and overkill unless you’re mining crypto in the living room. The math is brutal: Xiaomi pockets maybe €8 profit per unit, treating the box as a loss-leader to lock users into its ecosystem of robot vacuums and air purifiers. Translation: the discount isn’t a sale, it’s a strategy—and it expires the moment inventory hits the cargo ship.
AliExpress has already moved 12,000 units since midnight; the coupon auto-applies at checkout but caps out at 3,000 redemptions. When the counter hits zero the price snaps back to €64,99—still cheap, just no longer ridiculous.
I’ve reviewed streamers from Buffalo to Silicon Valley, and the takeaway is blunt: if your TV predates 2020, jamming this thing into its HDMI port is the single biggest picture-quality upgrade you can buy for the cost of two movie tickets. Buy two—one for the parents, one for the bedroom—before the algorithm notices demand and the grey-market scalbers swoop in.