14 DAY TRIAL // TV sticks are effectively everywhere. They come with an Android OS, they get plugged into the HDMI port of your TV and let you stream internet video, play games or run Android or Windows apps on your TV big screen.
However, there are few that have the processing power and feature HDMI 2.0 support to play 4K movies. Except Guleek's A8 Android TV stick. This device isn't something out of the ordinary at a first glance: it looks like an oversized USB drive that has a microSD slot, two micro USB ports (one for power), a full-sized USB port, and an Fn button.
However, this little device has something extra, like a foldable antenna which will definitely help with WiFi performance when streaming media to your TV. In addition to those external features, the Guleek has 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, 2GB of RAM, 8GB of eMMC storage, and Android 5.1 Lollipop software, which is a much better proposition in most respects than the majority of stick-sized PCs or TV sticks out there.
It can run 4K media but not perfectly
However, besides the impressive HDMI 2.0 connector, the other somewhat interesting feature of the new stick is Amlogic’s S905 processor, which is a quad-core, ARM Cortex-A53, 64-bit chip with ARM Mali-450 graphics and support for 4K video decoding at 60 frames in formats that, yes, includes the H.265 codec.
Unfortunately, as we'll see in the video below, this isn't the perfect 4K media rendering people would be expecting from a 4K-ready stick, but at least it has all the valid technology to support it. If it isn't powerful enough to play it smoothly, well, that's just your normal PC-on-a-stick performance.
According to AndroicPC, the new Guleek A8 is in prototype phase, so a bit of optimization and performance streamlining are to be expected. You can buy the Guleek A8 for about € 75 ($ 83.65) on Aliexpress
