introduction
Formovie Dice is a portable LED DLP projector, but not necessarily in the form factor you’d expect. Usually, portable projectors tend to be much more ‘pocket-sized’, while units with the general size of Dice tend to suggest stationary operation.
The Dice chooses to walk the unbeaten path. She packs respectable optical and audio prowess along with a battery inside what we’d call a bookshelf speaker-sized mobile package. Its primary intended use appears to be a night at the movies, perhaps even outdoors, as it sacrifices some of the portability in the name of multimedia quality.
Unpacking
The Formovie Dice comes in a well padded box with a carry handle. Two large pieces of dense foam inside hold the main unit in place. It shouldn’t have any problems shipping.
As for accessories, you get a laptop-sized wall charger and the appropriate cable for the EU or US. Next to this in a dedicated compartment is the remote control. There’s also some documentation and a quick install guide for a nice overall package.
Hardware
Let’s go over some specs and get a hardware overview of the Formovie Dice.
Formovie Says at a Glance:
- Dimensions: 155x125x60mm, 2.2kg.
- Optical Parameters: TI DLP LCD Projector; Optical resolution 1080p (1920 x 1080 pixels); aspect ratio 16:9; 8 bits.
- Projection parameters: 700 ANSI lumens (advertised); 40~200 inch screen diagonal; launch ratio 1.2:1; 4-channel RGB LEDs; 25,000 hours of LED light source life.
- Optical adjustment: Automatic keystone correction; auto focus.
- Audio: 2x5W speakers; Dolby + DTS Certified; Dolby Audio, DTS-HD codec support.
- I: 1 USB Type A port for data transfer or Ethernet; 1 HDMI 1.4 port; 1 x 3.5mm headphone port.
- Wireless Connectivity: WiFi 5 (ac); Bluetooth 4.0; IR remote control.
- Other characteristics:Remote control in box; HDR10; Android TV 9.0 with Google Assistant and Google Chromecast support; 16GB internal memory; 16,000mAh battery.
We’ve already mentioned the kind of Dice that fits in the footprint of a bookshelf speaker, it looks like one too. Formovie calls the unit’s color ‘mineral grey’, and it’s a very formal and unobtrusive dark silver on the bulk of the unit, slightly darker on the sides with a patterned pattern.
The included orange carrying handle adds a pop of color to the mix, which we personally like. Also, the handle is functional and absolutely necessary as at 155x125x60mm, the Dice might be huge, but weighing in at 2.2kg, it’s far from light and would otherwise have been quite awkward to handle.
Let’s take a quick spin of the dice to see what we’re working with. Starting at the front, we have a fairly large lens alongside a tiny camera.
The latter is there to power the autofocus feature. The Dice doesn’t have a lens cap for protection, which is a bit of a shame.
The back side of the unit has a loose mesh across the top. As far as we know, this is where the internal cooling fan resides. It is definitely audible all the time while using the dice. It’s a fairly quiet noise that the internal speakers can easily drown out, but it’s always there.
The I/O on the Dice is hidden away in its niche at the bottom of the unit. We don’t quite understand why Formovie decided to place the entire I/O panel this way, since it definitely makes it more difficult to plug and unplug things.
The options are also not many. Besides the power jack, you only get a 3.5mm audio port, a USB 2.0 port that can be used for data, as well as a USB to Ethernet adapter and an HDMI 1.4 port. That’s all. We were hoping to see at least a couple of HDMI inputs from the Dice, but perhaps that’s just us getting carried away with our demands for a portable projector.
The sides of the dice feature this cool mesh pattern and are open, at least to some extent. We believe this is where the dual 5W speakers reside, one on each side. Additionally, the sets are likely to help with ventilation as well.
The top of Formovie dice is mostly blank except for a small “control strip”. It houses only the power button and a single LED that indicates when the drive is on. We really would have liked to see some navigation controls here for Dice and its built-in Android TV. It seems like a serious omission.
The nut has four very grippy feet on the bottom. It doesn’t slip or slide at all which is great. Additionally, Formovie included a standard mounting point, so you can mount it on a tripod or, much less likely for a portable product, mount it on a ceiling. A nice touch.
The remote control is quite simple. It includes basic navigation controls plus a back and home button underneath. The far left button is for the app drawer. You also get a Google Assistant button on the remote, but voice reception and recognition were quite inaccurate during our tests.
Setting up
Setting up Formovie dice is very simple. When turned on, the unit goes through the auto keystone correction and auto focus process. Both work well enough, although the keystone correction did have issues with some surfaces. The autofocus has always been perfect. Of course, you can manually adjust both focus and keystone distortion if needed.
Projector settings
Although it is possible to use the Android TV 9 environment without logging into a Google account, we recommend that you log into it. It can be done entirely on the device or with the help of your smartphone.
Speaking of setup, it’s also important to note that Formovie Dice supports both front and rear projection modes as well as ceiling mounting the unit upside down using the included attachment point.
Operation
The operation of Formovie dice is quite simple. First of all you have the option, of course, to connect an external HDMI source and use the projector in this way. The Dice supports HDMI CEC, which is great to see, but unfortunately there’s no Audio Return Channel (ARC) for audio over HDMI.
CEC over HDMI support
You can also stream wirelessly via the built-in Chromecast. Many will surely rely on the built-in Android TV 9 OS to get content.
Input selection
The Android TV launcher that comes preloaded on Formovie Dice is extremely clean and user-friendly. There is absolutely nothing bloated and nothing to distract from the content. You are just greeted with the default channels interface.
Android TV main interface
The settings menu is also clean and well organized.
Settings menu
We’ve already looked at the projector’s settings menu, so now let’s move straight to the image-related options. The Formovie Dice has three brightness modes: View, which is the default and brightest one, Eco, which, as the name suggests, lowers the maximum brightness, and Office mode, which curiously seems to shift the color palette of the entire projector rather than simply adjust its brightness.
Image and brightness settings
The Dice has a good number of predefined color profiles to play with. In our humble opinion, the default mode seems to be the best of all. If you really feel like fine-tuning the image, you can use user mode. It offers brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, and hue sliders, as well as color temperature and a digital noise reduction switch.
Image options
Other than these, Formovie Dice has some general preferences, as is to be expected on any Android TV device.
Device preferences
Performance
Let’s start with image quality. The Formovie Dice produces a very sharp and clean image. It has great colors with no noticeable artifacts like color fringing. It’s very flexible in terms of focus distance – in our tests it managed to focus very close and produce an image smaller than the advertised minimum of 40 inches. As for the maximum, we were able to get a workable image measuring about 160 inches diagonal in a dark room. While Dice was happy to focus on an even larger image, the brightness of the output isn’t enough to make it useful in any way.
Speaking of brightness, the advertised figure of 700 ANSI lumens seems about right and is sufficient for a pitch dark room. If light is present, the nut is only good for casual viewing or perhaps a quick presentation in a pinch, and only in a moderately lit environment with a screen size no larger than 50 inches or so.
Thanks to its native 1080p resolution, Dice has enough detail to display moderately small text. However, we wouldn’t exactly recommend it for office work, outside of travel use, due to its limited brightness.
Unfortunately, dice are not suitable for games. It has a lot of input latency, too much for most games to be playable. There’s no dedicated game mode, so there’s no way to reduce latency.
The Dice’s stereo speakers deserve a lot of praise. These sound surprisingly rich and full given their size and can fill a room nicely. We honestly didn’t find it necessary to connect external speakers to the projector for much of the content we tried.
As for the internals, Formovie Dice runs on an undisclosed chipset with four Cortex-A53 cores, running at up to 1.4GHz, and with 2GB of RAM. Modest specs, by all accounts, but enough to run the Android TV 9 OS well without any hiccups and stutters.
Formovie Dice hardware specifications
Also, the hardware media decoder included within said chipset appears to be quite capable.
We tried to test Dice’s local streaming and playback features, and we weren’t disappointed. In local playback, the projector was able to play all jellyfish samples at up to 300 Mbps without dropping frames. The Dice was also perfectly happy playing 4K content on YouTube and playing personal rips in the highest quality in 4K using Plex.
Decoder functionality
YouTube and Plex streams
It is worth noting that Netflix was not available for Dice in the Google Play Store. Once I sideloaded the APK, however, it worked perfectly.
No Netflix apps
Battery life
One of the key features of Formovie Dice is the fact that it has a built-in 16,000mAh battery. The idea is that an internal battery pack makes the product much more flexible in terms of use cases. It all comes down to battery life, which on the dice is far from surprising.
Formovie says the dice should be able to last about three hours on a charge. That number is checked if you use dice in Eco mode. If you switch to full brightness mode, you can expect something closer to two hours max with a movie streaming over Wi-Fi and the speakers firing up at around 30% volume.
Two hours is a bit of a precarious number, especially when it comes to watching movies. Many titles will run longer in runtime, and since there’s nothing worse than being cut off mid-film for lack of battery, we’d probably err on the side of caution and stick with titles with less than an hour and a half of battery .
Unfortunately, due to the use of a proprietary barrel plug and non-standard 19V 4.74A power input, the Dice cannot be easily charged from a power bank. Instead, we would have liked to see a Type-C input and a standard 20V voltage rating. On a more positive note, at least the Dice can charge and run while plugged in. Charging the battery, however, is quite slow.
Final thoughts
All in all, there is a lot to like about Formovie dice. It is bright enough for its size and produces a very sharp and detailed image. Both autofocus and auto keystone correction work well and are reliable. Its speakers are pretty good and can get really loud, thanks to its dual 5W speakers. It’s quite flexible with its Android TV OS too.
On the flip side, we have to wonder why Formovie would go to such lengths to fit a battery inside the Dice and make it compact enough to be “portable” only for the battery to only last two hours. Maybe there’s a use case we’re not seeing here, but it seems like Formovie Dice is trying to be too many things at once. That doesn’t mean that a certain subset of users won’t like the kind of versatility it offers.
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