Usage
For those looking for a media player that is completely ready to go out of the box the XIOS may not be the media player for you. Once you get it connected to your display and turn it on you are brought to a blank Android home screen. From here you can enter your Google credentials and download different applications. While having the included remote did help, it was not very fun. Android is definitely not made to be used with a remote. I opted to use a mouse and keyboard most of the time. To make things easier Pivos has created their own Launcher for the XIOS, which can be installed using a USB flash drive or microSD card.
Once it is installed you it makes the device much easier to use with the remote. It has sections for media, music and games. You have to add apps and files to these sections yourself though. With all of the apps available on the app store there are quite a few different media options you can choose from. For video I opted to install the MX Player, XBMC and Hulu. For the MX Player it had no issues whatsoever playing all different types of file formats including 720p and 1080p .mkv videos. I thought I might see some lag on the 1080p video, but it played without any issues. The Hulu app worked just the same, no issues. For all of those wondering about Netflix, it is possible to get it working on the XIOS, but I have heard of some issues.
One interesting thing about this device is that it can be completely flashed to run XBMC natively. This means you can actually flash the device and instead of running Android it will run Linux and launch XBMC on startup. Of course this is for advanced users. Pivos does list nightly builds of XBMC on their forums.
When it comes to audio Android does have a default music player, but of course you can download many different music listening and streaming apps. I actually downloaded a few different games on the XIOS and enjoyed playing them. Although some games are designed for a vertical screen and since there is no screen adjustment they are unplayable. I would definitely suggest at least using a mouse to play games, a keyboard would not hurt either.
Besides just being able to play media and games you can also browse the web and use different news and weather apps. While web pages loaded a bit slower than on my PC or even iPhone, they did load and it was nice relaxing on the couch catching up on tech news.
