Seeing (Android) is not believing

At IBC 2009 Kaon were displaying an "Android set top box" on their stand. It was playing HD video with Android graphics overlaid. Apart from one sign it was just one of dozens of set top boxes Kaon were displaying on their impressive stand. This was rather surprising as you would think an Android set top would be big news.

Two other things were quite strange. The graphics seemed fuzzy, not clear at all, and the set top box itself was quite large: I had expected an Android set top box to be quite small, Android coming from the mobile space.

It occurred that there was a good explanation. Although encased in production set top box housing the "set top box" was far from production inside, consisting of two hardware boards. The first was a normal set top box, running the video with a central CPU, and the second was running the Android, on a different central CPU. My guess is that this was effectively a mobile phone HDK. The resolution of output of the Android part was 800x480 (odd, but thats what I was told) and this was then overlaid on the true HD output of the set top box.