Teewe is a streaming device created by an Indian startup as an answer to Google’s popular Chromecast.
As you may know, Chromecast lets you stream video, music and photos stored on your NAS (Network-attached Storage), computers, Android and iOS smartphones to your TV via the dongle. Teewe works exactly like that, but could be termed as the Indianized version, specifically targeted at viewers in India.
While Chromecast is immensely popular, it hasn’t been officially launched in India and that’s where Teewe comes into the picture. It not only tries to fill in the gap created by the users’ need of Chromecast but also does so at an affordable price of just Rs. 1,999. If you try to import Chromecast in India or buy it from eBay, then you’ll have to shell out over Rs. 3,000.
Lets look at Teewe in more detail
Contents
Looks, Build Quality & Hardware
As far as the looks go, Teewe is exactly what you would expect it to be – A narrow bar shaped made up of matte-finish plastic with perforations at its sides for heat dissipation. It supports standard HDMI interface and is powered up via a micro USB port.
The overall build quality looks good and the dongle houses a dual-core 1.5 GHz Cortex-A9 processor along with 1 GB DDR3 RAM. It also supports ‘b’, ‘g’, and ‘n’ Wi-Fi channels for ensuring that it is backward compatible with old phones and laptops.
Setting it up
Setting up the Teewe device is a fairly easy task.
All you have to do is to make sure that your Teewe and your phone are on the same Wi-Fi network. After they’re connected to your home/office network, just follow the simple step-by-step instructions on your phone to finish the setup process.
Elevate your TV watching experience with Teewe
The home screen of the Teewe on the smartphone is populated with various interesting local language videos and TV shows. All of these are arranged in separate rows with a row per category. This is the heart of and the USP of Teewe. They do the laborious task of collating and curating the content that suits the Indian junta!
The options will let you navigate to home, trending videos section, Live TV, YouTube, Movies, TV Shows, and even the files on your phone.
One of the new feature of Teewe we really liked is the Media server, which essentially allows you to stream all the videos on your local computers, smartphones (on same network) on your TV.
In our tests, Teewe played all videos (up to full HD) residing on my network-attached storage drive and laptop just fine. The playback was seamless and without any issues.
The app also lets you select if you want to play YouTube videos in HD or not. As per our tests conducted on a 4 Mbps fibre connection, Teewe could play HD videos from YouTube without any stutter. Full HD YouTube video playback pictures were on the softer side and we did experience out of sync audio stream and stutters a couple of times.
The Not-So-Good – Live TV Channel Streaming
First of all the live TV quality was not at all upto the mark and it did not play properly. In our tests, we waited for more than 2 minutes before giving up on trying to watch live TV via Teewe.
Interestingly, the app doesn’t have any option to watch videos from Vimeo. Vimeo is the home to some of the best high quality and professionally shot videos on the internet. I was really looking forward to watching some of my favourite Vimeo videos via Teewe but the app left me disappointed.
Where and When can I buy Teewe?
When Teewe first launched a few months back, it quick went out of stock and was sold out. Luckily, they will start their second sale from tomorrow (From 21st November 2014). At the time of writing this, the sale was going to start in about 18 hours from now!
Final Verdict
Teewe is a great cheap alternative to Google Chromecast until the latter is launched in India at its official price of $35 (around Rs. 2000). But, that may not be happening in near future.
For many Indians, Teewe may actually serve even better than Chromecast because of it’s USP – Loads of great Indian content!
We like their Media server feature. Teewe is a great device to own if you are bored of transferring your multimedia files on to flash drives for enjoying them on your TV screen. You can also stream HD videos from YouTube without any playback issues and for most of the occasions; HD quality does the job very well.
You can’t use Teewe to replace your cable connection till the developers resolve the live TV playback issues and probably switch their live TV feeds (currently many TV channels we tried show ZengaTV watermark).
Other alternative methods for playing network files on your TV are via DLNA, miracast for Android devices and using an HDMI cable for mirroring your laptop’s display on to your TV. If this is too much complicated and messy for you, then just get Teewe and enjoy flawless streaming on big screen.
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