The MiniPCDB Spotlight is a series of articles about Mini PC's that are not new to the market, but should receive more attention due to the good quality hardware or continued manufacturer updates(or even community-created custom ROM's). Today we'll talk about Zidoo and their X9 product.

Zidoo is a young brand which already has a good reputation for rather good-looking (and apparently well-designed) hardware and a R&D team that proved themselves capable to provide a steady flow of updates for their X9 product.

A good brand reputation does not grow overnight and it can be very hard to maintain, but they seem well connected to the community, they do their best to reply to emails and support requests (see forum.zidoo.tv) and basically do all the right things you would expect from a manufacturer.

Why did we choose Zidoo X9 for the spotlight?

Zidoo X9 has a very rare function amongst Android TV boxes: it can record from HDMI!

Since the Realtek RT1283DD SoC is no longer in production there was an unfulfilled need for an affordable media/TV box that could also server as an PVR (Personal Video Recorder) - to record from external sources.

Zidoo X9 does just that, and although it's CPU power is not a match for the Amlogic A80 or Rockchip RK3288 SoC's, the Mstar MSO9180D1R should provide enough power for normal use, bringing you good results for around (and even under) $100.

Mstar MSO9180 has a quad-core Arm Cortex A9 CPU (up to 1.5Ghz, early reviews note the Zidoo X9 to be clocked at ~1.1Ghz, probably to keep the unit from overheating).

The GPU is Mali-450 MP2 dual, 8-cores which is to be considered nowadays as mid-range. The Zidoo X9 has 2GB of RAM, 8GB of eMMC storage,Bluetooth 4.0 and dual-band wi-fi. The internal storage can be extended with an SD card.

It has two HDMI ports (in and out), 1 USB 3.0 and 2 USB 2.0 ports, 10/100M LAN and composite and Optical SPDIF outputs.

It has a physical on/off button on the back, something I find very useful. The front has a small LCD panel and the device does come with an IR remote - and you can also control it with the dedicated smartphone app.

We'll be reviewing this device shortly and we plan a full review for it.