Android will be celebrating its tenth birthday in September and the operating system has come a long way in terms of features and stability. Its versatility – and the fact that it is free – has made it possible for even the smallest vendors to come up with solid products at fair price compare to cable. And the H96 Max H2 is one of them.

This is an Android box – built by one factory and sporting various names – that can be used by businesses as a thin client to access cloud resources (and occasionally as a TV box thanks to a bundled remote control). Moreover, it manages to hit an incredible level of performance.

What makes the H96 Max special is the 4GB memory and 32GB of storage, offering enough capacity for those looking to install a decent quantity of apps locally.



Design

There’s nothing spectacular about the design of the H96 Max. It doesn’t have the cachet of the Voyo V3 Mini PC or the ambitious design of the Sunvell T95P PC-in-a-plug. Instead, it is a bog standard slab of plastic with sides that are 113mm long and 24mm high, sitting on four plastic feet.


There’s an LCD display at the front which doubles as a status screen, and plenty of vents on five sides to allow the device to cool passively.

The top is adorned by a funky lid made of plastic, and as for the ports, there are plenty with three USB 2.0 connectors, one USB 3.0, SPDIF and audio out, an RJ45 Ethernet port (100Mbps), HDMI 2.0 and an SD card slot. Another version of the box comes with a Type-C connector and a microSD slot, both of which are preferable in everyday life.

The enclosure feels reasonably solid which means that you can easily carry it around in a bag, and that’s certainly a boon for those inclined to work remotely.


Specifications

The device uses an ARM Cortex-A53-based quad-core processor, clocked at up to 1.5GHz, with an ARM Mali-450MP2 GPU and support for HDMI 2.0 (delivering proper 4K@60Hz output).

As expected you get 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 but no Gigabit Ethernet, which is a shame.

This is doubtless part of the cost-cutting to reach a low price point, and the same could be said for the use of USB 2.0 ports (in the majority).

That said, the 4GB of DDR3 memory and the 32GB eMMC on-board storage more than make up for these cut corners, especially at this price.

BENCHMARKS

Here’s how the H96 Max H2 performed in our suite of benchmark tests:

Passmark: 2938

Passmark CPU: 41407

Geekbench: 549 (single-core); 1526 (multi-core); 1131 (compute)

Antutu: 57896

Antutu 3D: Did not run

PCMark Work 2.0: 2227

Androbench: Did not run

3DMark Ice: 2214

Basemark: Did not run

Bonsai: 1284

HWBot Prime: 2646


Usage and performance

This Android box proved to be fast enough for most of the tasks we threw at it. The fact that it uses a quad-core processor with old GPU technology means that this box isn’t suited for games, as evidenced by the benchmark results.

The H96 Max sports the sort of full-size menu screen expected on similar TV boxes, and it’s one that can be customized. The bundled applications are also heavily focused on entertainment rather than work, but Google Play is only a few clicks away anyway.