Just over two years ago, we reviewed the Xiaomi TV Stick 4K. We found it to be a solid player, but its support for HDR formats was lacking. The company just unveiled the second generation model that fixes that and brings a host of other improvements.
The Xiaomi TV Stick 4K 2nd gen is powered by a new chipset with a quad-core Cortex-A55 CPU and an ARM Mali-G310 V2 GPU. Compared to the old chip (4x A35, Mali-G31 MP2), this one has 80% higher CPU performance and a whopping 150% boost to GPU performance. The memory capacity remains unchanged at 2GB RAM and 8GB storage, however.
This now runs Google TV interface. Google made a mess of its TV product naming, but Google TV is the one you want (Android TV is the older launcher but also the name of the OS).
The new stick supports not only Dolby Vision, but also HDR10+ (which was lacking on the first-gen stick). For audio, it handles both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. The original stick already supported AV1 decoding, as does this one.
Connectivity has been improved with faster Wi-Fi 6 (ax, up from Wi-Fi 5/ac). Bluetooth is the same at v5.2.
The included remote has a few new buttons. It uses Bluetooth, as the stick is likely to be hidden behind your TV and infrared won’t work (IR needs line of sight). The new Xiaomi TV+ launches a free live TV streaming service. It also adds YouTube and Apps buttons to the Netflix and Prime Video buttons.
Right now, the Xiaomi TV Stick 4K 2nd gen is listed on AliExpress for €40/$46 (this is with a claimed 52% discount). We should start seeing it on other retailers soon too.
