Inside Walmart’s onn. 4K Plus: A streaming device with a hidden bonus

22 hours ago 2

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Walmart onn. coverage

Walmart’s onn. (or is it now just “onn”?) line of streaming media boxes and sticks are regularly represented here at Brian’s Brain, for several good reasons. They’re robustly featured, notably more economical than Google’s own Android TV-now-Google TV offerings, and frequently price-undershoot competitive devices from companies like Apple and Roku, too. Most recently, from a “box” standpoint, I took apart the company’s high-end onn. 4K Pro for publication at EDN in July, following up on the entry-level onn. 4K, which had appeared in April. And, within a subsequent August-published teardown of Google’s new TV Streamer 4K, I also alluded to an upcoming analysis of Walmart’s mid-tier onn. 4K Plus.

An intro to the onn.

That time is now. And “mid-tier” is subjective. Hold that thought until later in the write-up. For now, I’ll start with some stock shots:

Here’s how Walmart slots the “Plus” within its current portfolio of devices:

Note that, versus the Pro variant, at least in its final configuration, the remote control is not backlit this time. I was about to say that I guess we now know where the non-backlit remotes for the initial production run(s) of the Pro came from, although this one’s got the Free TV button, so it’s presumably a different variant from the other two, too (see what I did there?). Stand by.

And hey, how about a promo video too, while we’re at it?

Now for some real-life photos. Box shots first:

Is it wrong…

that I miss the prior packaging, even though there’s no longer a relevant loop on top of the box?

I digress. Onward:

Time to dive inside:

Inside is a two-level tray, with our patient (and its companion wall wart) on top, along with a sliver of literature:

Flip the top half over:

and the rest of the kit comes into view: a pair of AA batteries, an HDMI cable, and the aforementioned remote control:

Since I just “teased” the remote control, let’s focus on that first, as usual, accompanied by a 0.75″ (19.1 mm) diameter U.S. penny for size comparison purposes:

All looks the same as before so far, eh? Well then, last but not least, let’s look at the back:

Specifically, what does the product-code sticker say this time?

Yep, v2.32, different than the predecessors. Here’s the one in the baseline onn. 4K (v2.15, if you can’t read the tiny print):

And the two generations that ship(ped) with the 4K Pro, Initial (v2.26):

And subsequently, whose fuller feature set matched the from-the-beginning advertising (v2.30):

Skipping past the HDMI cable and AA battery set (you’re welcome), here’s the wall wart:

Complete with a “specs” close-up,”

whose connector, believe it or not, marks the third iteration within the same product generation: micro-USB for the baseline 4K model:

“Barrel” for the 4K Pro variant:

And this time, USB-C:

I would not want to be the person in charge of managing onn. product contents inventory…

Finally, our patient, first still adorned with its protective translucent, instructions-augmented plastic attire:

And now, stark nekkid. Top:

Front:

Bare left side:

Back: left-to-right are the reset switch, HDMI output, and USB-C input. Conceptually, you could seemingly tether the latter to an OTG (on-the-go) splitter, thereby enabling you to (for example) feed the device with both power and data coming from an external storage device, but in practice, it’s apparently hit-and-miss at best:

And equally bare right side:

There’s one usual externally visible adornment that we haven’t yet seen. Can you guess what it is before reading the following sentence?

Yes, clever-among-you, that’s right: it’s the status LED. Flip the device over and…there it be:

Now for closeups of the underside marking and (in the second) the aforementioned LED, which is still visible from the front of the device when illuminated because it’s on a beveled edge:

Enough of the teasing. Let’s get inside. For its similar-form-factor mainstream 4K precursor, I’d gone straight to the exposed circumference gap between the two halves. But I couldn’t resist a preparatory peek underneath the rubber feet that taunted me this time:

Nope. No screw heads here:

Opening it up

Back to Plan B:

There we go, with only a bit of collateral clip-snipped damage:

The inside of the bottom half of the case is bland, unless you’re into translucent LED windows:

The other half of the previous photo is much more interesting (at least to me):

Three more screws to go…

And the PCB then lifts right out of the enclosure’s remaining top half:

Allowing us to first-time see the PCB topside:

Here are those two PCB sides again, now standalone. Bottom:

and top:

Much as (and because) I know you want me to get to ripping the tops off those Faraday cages, I’ll show you some side shots first. Right:

Front; check out those Bluetooth and Wi-Fi antennae, reminiscent of the ones in the original 4K:

Left:

And back:

Let’s pop the top off the PCB bottom-side cage first:

Pretty easy; I managed that with just my fingernail and a few deft yanks:

At the bottom is the aforementioned LED:

And within the cage boundaries,

are two ICs of particular note; an 8 Gbit (1 GByte) Micron DDR4 SDRAM labeled as follows:

41R77
D8BPK

And, below these ICs are the nonvolatile memory counterpart, a FORESEE FEMDNN016G 16 GByte eMMC.

Now for the other (top) side. As you likely already noticed from the side shots, the total cage height here is notably thicker than that of its bottom-side counterpart. That’s because, unsurprisingly, there’s a heat sink stuck on top of it. Heat rises, after all; I already suspected, even before not finding the application processor inside the bottom-side cage, that we’d find it here instead.

My initial attempts at popping off the cage-plus-heatsink sandwich using traditional methods—first my fingernail, followed by a Jimmy—were for naught, threatening only to break my nail and bend the blade, as well as to damage the PCB alongside the cage base. I then peeked under the sticker attached to the top of the heatsink to see if it was screwed down in place. Nope:

Eventually, by jamming the Jimmy in between the heatsink and cage top, I overcame the recalcitrant adhesive that to that point had succeeded in keeping them together:

Now, the cage came off much more easily. In retrospect, it was the combined weight of the two pieces (predominantly the heatsink, a hefty chunk of metal) that had seemingly made my prior efforts be for naught:

At the bottom, straddling the two aforementioned antennae, is the same Fn-Link Technology 6252B-SRB wireless communications module that we’d found in the earlier 4K Pro teardown:

And inside the cage? Glad you asked:

To the left is the other 8 Gbit (1 GByte) Micron DDR4 SDRAM. And how did I know they’re both DDR4 in technology, by the way? That’s because it’s the interface generation that mates up with the IC on the right, the application processor, which is perhaps the most interesting twist in this design. It’s the Amlogic S905X5M, an upgrade to the S905X4 found in the 4K Pro. It features a faster Arm Cortex A-55 CPU quad-core cluster (2.5 GHz vs 2 GHz), which justifies the beefy heatsink, and an enhanced GPU core (Arm Mali-G310 v2 vs Arm Mali-G21 MP2).

The processing enhancements bear fruit when you look at the benchmark comparisons. Geekbench improvements for the onn. 4k Plus scales linearly with the CPU clock speed boost:

While GFXBench comparative results also factor in the graphics subsystem enhancements:

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out the pricing disparity between the two systems: the 4K Plus sells for $29.88 while the 4K Pro is normally priced $20 more than that ($49.88), although as I type these words, it’s promotion-priced at 10% off, $44.73. Folks primarily interested in gaming on Google TV platforms, whether out-of-the-box or post-jailbreaking, are understandably gravitating toward the cheaper, more computationally capable 4K Plus option.

That said, the 4K Pro also has 50% more DRAM and twice the storage, along with an integrated wired Ethernet connectivity option and other enhancements, leaving it the (potentially, at least) better platform for general-purpose streaming box applications, if price isn’t a predominant factor.

That wraps up what I’ve got for you today. I’ll keep the system disassembled for now in case readers have any additional parts-list or other internal details questions once the write-up is published. And then, keeping in mind the cosmetic-or-worse damage I did getting the heatsink and topside cage off, I’ll put it back together to determine whether its functionality was preserved. One way or another, I’ll report back the results in the comments. And speaking of which, I look forward to reading your thoughts there, as well.

—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.