There are plenty of Android-powered TV boxes designed to let you run apps, surf the web, and even run the XBMC media center software on your TV. But the G-Box Midnight MX2 is one of the few that's really designed with XBMC in mind.
Matricom's latest TV box comes with a custom version of XBMC preloaded. Not only does it support hardware-accelerated video playback for a wide range of video formats, but it's also configured to make installing add-ons for Hulu, Amazon, and other internet media sites as easy as possible.
The G-Box Midnight MX2 also more ports than most Android TV boxes, comes with a wireless remote control, features access to the Google Play Store, and comes pre-rooted, which lets you install apps that require root access.
The media box still has a few quirks that take some getting used to, but if you're looking for an inexpensive device that lets you run XBMC on your TV, the G-Box Midnight MX2 is one of the best options around.
It's available from Amazon for $100
Overview
The Matricom G-Box Midnight MX2 is a little larger than an Apple TV, but at about 5″ x 5″ x 2″ it's still a relatively small box that takes up less space by your TV than, say, a DVD player.
It features 4 USB ports which you can use to plug in a keyboard, mouse, game controller, USB flash drive, or other devices. You can hook up the device to your TV using an HDMI cable or composite cables. It also supports SPDIF digital audio output.
The box connects to the internet over WiFi or you can plug in an Ethernet cable to the 10/100 Ethernet jack.
Under the hood the MX2 is powered by an Amlogic AM8726 ARM Cortex-A9 dual core processor with ARM Mali 400 graphics. It has 1 GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, and runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean software.
Not only does the device come preloaded with XBMC, a media center app designed to make it easy to access your music, movies, videos, and other content on a TV. But it also includes a custom app launcher for Android which is a bit more remote control-friendly than the stock Android user interface (which was designed for phones and tablets).
Remote, keyboard, other forms of input
Matricom includes an infrared remote control which you can use to navigate. It sports direction buttons, a mouse cursor mode (which is kind of frustrating to use, but which helps you move an on-screen pointer if you don't happen to have a mouse handy), and dedicated buttons for Android functions including Home, back, and menu.
Note that the button marked "return" on the remote acts as the Android back button, for some reason.
The remote works quite nicely with XBMC and the MX2′s custom app launcher. It also works surprisingly well for navigating the Google Play Store — I was a bit surprised to find that the Play Store is actually easier to navigate on the MX2 than it is on the Asus CUBE. That's surprising because the CUBE is running Google TV, an operating system that's designed for television screens, while the MX2 is running Android, which was designed for touchscreen displays.
But that probably says more about just how bad the Play Store looks on the Google TV platform than how well it works for Android TV boxes.
Unfortunately while the wireless remote works great for navigating the home screen and controlling media playback, it falls short in other areas. You can't really use this remote to play games, and even surfing the web is kind of tricky. That's because it's not really designed to handle common Android actions such as swiping or dragging. And since it doesn't have a QWERTY keyboard, entering text is kind of a pain.
You can use the remote to enter text using an on-screen keyboard, but it's a slow and painstaking process. If you plan to do a lot of web browsing, chatting, or instant messaging, you'll want to plug in a
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