Introduction

With everyone having an individual smartphone these days and most which aren't an Apple product is running some sort of Droid OS on it. So individually, you can sit and watch a movie on your phone or tablet, you can game on it; really you can do just about anything on these new devices out on the market today. The only thing I see wrong with the idea of the individual devices for personal use is what happens when someone comes over? Typically if you wanted to show a friend or family something on your small-ish screens or prop it on a table as you both stare into it trying to watch the latest movie or YouTube videos.

Thanks to the gang over at Pivos Group, there is a new way to essentially take said smartphones and tablets and devise a device to offer the same feel as these devices, but now you simply connect it to the TV or home entertainment system. This way when friends and family show up for a party, you can simply walk over to the couch and show all of your videos, even play games on the home theater system. Now I know everyone into tech has sat around with their buddies over a few drinks wondering how to connect their phone to a TV to have the large screen we all would rather watch HD movies on, but up till now were really limited with limited availability of connectors or pass-through cables being offered to do so.

The idea from Pivos is to make the XIOS DS Media Play! a unit that won't replace the smartphone in your pocket, but with this device there is a seamless transition from the phone while you are on the go, right on into the couch for catching up while you eat dinner or lounge around the house. Of course this media box doesn't make phone calls, but with all the apps that come on the XIOS DS from Pivos and the huge Droid Marketplace, there really isn't much you can't find to do with this unit.

I have used a couple of media players in the past, I have even started to move into mini-PCs as of late and I have to say, the XIOS DS is the perfect cross over device that offers you the best of both worlds. With a load of codecs, a bigger list of supported file types and the intuitive connectivity of the XIOS DS, it really is much more of a mini-PC/tablet than a standalone media player as I have seen them before.

I for one always wished there was a way to take tablets and phones and connect them to a much bigger screen and now Pivos has brought that exact concept to fruition and I get to test it out and show it off to you right now.