I am not advertising this, I'm just passing on my experience so if this is the wrong place, please just kill the post.
Since this thing was so cheap, I had to try it. $95+ tax at the local Fry's.
I bought the STB370 model.
Manufacturer's specs and general sales material:
http://www.sungale.com/index.asp?m=showp...x&p=STB370
So far, I can say I'm severely disappointed, however I really didn't expect much considering the low specs on this.
XBMC Frodo 12.2 is preloaded on the system, but is an "app" of some sort.
When you first boot it up, you get a main menu that lets you choose between a rather large variety of things, one of them being xbmc - Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, etc.
And of course you have access to Google Spy, er, I mean Play.
The oddest bit about this thing is the MAC address for the wired ethernet port gets a new MAC address every time it's booted up - it's like everything, even the hardware runs from a virtual machine that gets rebuilt at boot time (which is probably the case considering the boot time is measured in minutes, not seconds).
It has an internet radio streaming app that works well from what I can tell, and so far that and Youtube seems to be the only saving grace.
How does XBMC work?
I used an NFS export from my media server through the XBMC interface and have been able to have XBMC scan the storage and scrape for metadata on the ISO and MKV files.
I use .nfo files with links to tmdb.org for each ISO or MKV file. This worked well, once I changed the NFS exports to insecure.
Playing any media is another issue. It will attempt to open .ISO files of DVDs, but will never make it to the menu. You just fall back to the XBMC menu.
If you try to play a BlueRay rip to MKV, XBMC will exit altogether and you fail back to the appliance main menu.
All in all, its a good idea - an appliance if you will already running XBMC with the same footprint and under $100 price tag, but it just doesn't work so far.
I suspect low memory is the primary issue - the specs state "4GB of Memory" but I suspect it's really talking about local storage, not OS memory.
XBMC system info panel shows it's running an SMP version of a 3.x linux kernel - probably fairly stock android.
There is an 800 number for US residents for tech support - they operate on Pacific time Mon-Fri with an answering machine that says if you leave a number they will call back.
I left a message last night asking for a call back, we'll see what happens.
I have 30 days to return it to Fry's and my guess it's going back - keeping in mind the only reason I bought this was I wanted an appliance with XBMC preloaded so I wouldn't have to go through the process of jail-break and load process of things like the Amazon Fire TV.
