I was extremely excited to read about the new Onn Box. Especially after watching Troy’s first impressions and how to super charge videos, I ordered my own the day he announced it was available for shipping. Yesterday, a dark, damp rainy Saturday, I spent a good 7-8 hours swapping out my Firestick 4K Max with the Onn. Most everything Troy described in his review and tutorial proved accurate. The box was very responsive, the Google TV OS was much better than Firestick’s bloated and ad dominated OS. But, I ran into my first critical fail when installing and trying to use Wolf Launcher with Launch Manager. That launcher (which works flawlessly on my 4K Max) bombed on the Onn Box. It produced a non-working screen which rendered the Onn Box inoperable. I followed Troy’s installation video exactly, but after hours of painstaking downloads, installation and configurations, I had to perform a factory reset. However, I could not even get to system settings, and pressing the reset button while powering on the device did not work. It brought up the screen to factory reset, but there was no way I could select the correct option to reset (there were three options requiring you to scroll down to select reset, but no way to do that). After much sweating and swearing I tried Google voice command “Open Settings”, and almost cried with relief when lo and behold, the settings menu appeared and I did a factory reset. THEN, I went through the entire process again, without installing Wolf Launcher. So, I installed the basics, attached and formatted a USB drive as internal storage, Nord VPN, and lastly Kodi and various add-ons. Finally, I did a test drive and streamed a movie. It would not play. It was 4K, around 10 gig file size, and while it did start (and looked beautiful), when I paused it and started it again, it buffered, jittered, froze and finally crashed. I immediately thought it might be a network issue, ran the speed test (BTW, the Analiti Speed Test app no longer appears on the Troypoint Toolbox so I used a Kodi speed test add-on), and was shocked to find my download speed was HALF of what I got on the Firestick. This was using the same VPN settings and network settings, but the results were abysmal. I was so angry and discouraged at this point that I swapped back my Firestick, tested my download speed (it was back up to around 70 Mbps with the VPN engaged), streamed the same movie and it worked flawlessly. So, why the failure? My guess is that it has to do with the reduced RAM and the weaker processing chip used by the Onn. Perhaps its WiFi chip is also subpar. But those are only guesses. Whatever the reason(s), the Firestick is back and the Onn Box is headed back to Walmart. I was so upset because I had such high hopes that I could end my toxic relationship with Amazon’s Firestick which is becoming increasingly more locked down, but the Onn Box is not the victorious usurper I had hoped it would be. I wonder if Troy’s initial impressions of the Onn Box may change as he spends more time using it. For now, anyone want a “like-new” Onn Box?
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