Everytime Google, Apple or any other big company comes up with a unique product, the market gets filled with cheap replicas from China.
This happened with Chromecast as well. When Google Launched their Chromecast three years ago, we started seeing a lot of such devices in the market.
These were termed as Anycast, come in a design similar to the Chromecast but are generic ones.
They offer similar functionality like the Chromecast but are cheaper, way cheaper than the Google Chromecast.
Google Chromecast is available at Rs 2999/-, you can get these generic anycast devices for as less as Rs 500.
How do these a generic anycast devices perform?
To be honest, you can do much better with Rs 500 than these generic Anycast devices,
First thing is, they do not come with any kind of warranty, so if it stops working, you don’t have anywhere to go and get it fixed.
There is no guarantee that this device will work for the next 15 days or 15 months.
The user interface of all the generic anycast devices is pretty much like this
It gives two options,
- Miracast (mirror your smartphone screen to the TV)
- DLNA (Cast content to the TV and use your mobile for other activities.
For my test device, only the first option of mirroring the smartphone screen to the TV worked, the second option did not work at all.
Even when the first option who worked, it only worked a for a few minutes, most of the times it was lagging, and at times it simply rebooted, which made me do the steps of connecting it to the smartphone all over again and.
And after five minutes of using it, when I touched the device connected at the back of the TV via HDMI port, it was heating like a hot cake.
It’s better to get a Chromecast, which works way better than these cheaper ones. The cheap price of such devices is certainly not worth the headache.