Patriot's Box Office helped the memory company diversify and now it's giving Android a try with the PBO Alpine. Patriot showed me a very early concept of the Alpine running Android 2.2. The experience obviously needs a lot of work but the promise is an affordable Android based media streamer that allows you to run Android apps.

There's no market support of course since this isn't an official Google TV deployment, but you could always sideload. Given that this is a concept there's still the chance that Patriot could take the Alpine in a more Google TV-like route when Google makes the source available.
 
Patriot had no additional information on the Alpine so forgive the lack of SoC details. We'll update this post if we come across any more information.
 
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  • Rainman200 - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link

    A decent stab at a UI, if the included a movie jukebox it would be a bit more appealing, if there is a decent SoC in it with a GPU there is no reason they can do something a bit more fancy.

    Android network media players have started shipping in other parts of the world, unfortunately the first ones to do so are based of the Marvell Armada 88DE3010 chipset which lacks a GPU so although Android apps run anything that needs OpenGL ES runs at a snails pace.

    Review in German http://alturl.com/6z8nu

    There's a whole bunch of Chinese Android TV boxes out there too but it doesn't look like any of them have worked their way here yet.
  • g1011999 - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link

    The main SoC is from
    http://www.skyviia.com.tw/chinese/P_ITEMs.asp?T_ID...

    Upmost has similar player box with the same UI and software.
  • ganeshts - Wednesday, June 1, 2011 - link

    Good catch from the build number :)

    ARM9 as the host processor.. I am not keeping my hopes up for the responsiveness of the system, but let us wait and watch.
  • burntham77 - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link

    If they can make it as feature rich as Windows Media Center, I'll give it a shot.

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