14 DAY TRIAL // Lots of TVs offer "smart" features today, things like streaming video from Netflix, YouTube, buy things on Amazon, and so on. However, when your smart TV gets dumb and apps require a better device, what do you do? You buy a new one.
Well, not in TCL TV’s case. The company has apparently decided to offer, besides newer and better overall TVs, some fancy upgrade kits, which basically consist in the brains of your TV so that you can pull out your old SoC and put a newer one back in.
Yes, there are alternatives that do that as well, there are third-party TV streamers like Roku, Apple TV, or Amazon Fire TV, but if you just upgrade the CPU and the GPU inside your TV, you'll get plenty of more advantages.
The modular TV design will help people save money far more than before
As an example, TCL is showing a Transformer Kit for its E6800 Ultra HD smart TV. The kit, which is basically a small box that connects at the back of your TV, contains an ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core processor with ARM Mali-450 graphics and Google Android software. At the moment, everything is new and shiny, but the CPU and GPU will get quite powerless at some point, so instead of throwing away the whole screen, why not buy a new kit from TCL, if they' continue to make them, that is?
Right now, the guys at ARM Devices have tested the new Transformer Kit, and it looks like it works exactly as you'd imagine it to if you take out the processing module together with its connectivity ports and plug a new one back in.
This seems a nice thing to do in order to help users save money while they’ll still be buying modules from you as a manufacturer on a yearly basis. It's interesting to see if connectivity ports will be updated as well with the ARM processors.
