Introduction
The Formovie Dice is a portable LED DLP projector, but it doesn’t necessarily look what one might expect. In general, portable projectors tend to be more “portable”, while units about the size of a Dice tend to suggest stationary operation.
The dice choose to take the road of invincibility. It packs some respectable optics and audio prowess, as well as batteries, in what we call a mobile package the size of a bookshelf speaker. Its primary use appears to be movie night, and possibly even outdoor movies, since it sacrifices some portability in the name of multimedia quality.
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Unboxing
Formovie Dice Comes in a well padded box with handle. Inside are two large pieces of dense foam that hold the main unit in place. Shipping should be no problem.
Regarding the accessories, you get a laptop sized wall charger and works in EU or American cable. In a dedicated compartment next to it sits the remote control. There’s also some documentation and a nice quick setup guide for the overall package.
Hardware
Let’s review some specs and roll the dice on Formovie.
Formovie dice at a glance:
We’ve already mentioned that the Dice kind of fits into the footprint of a bookshelf speaker, and it looks kind of like that too. Formovie calls the fixture’s color “Mineral Grey,” and it’s a very formal and unobtrusive dark silver on most of the fixture, slightly darker on the sides, with garish patterns.
The included orange carry handle adds to the mix A touch of color, which is our personal favorite. In addition, the handle is very practical and necessary, because in 125X028X At 2.2kg, it’s definitely not lightweight or it would be awkward to handle.
Let’s take a brief look at Dice and see what we’re using. Starting with the front, we have a fairly large lens and a tiny camera.
The latter is used for the auto focus function Provide power. It’s a pity that Dice doesn’t have a protective lens cover.
There is a Large mesh. As far as we can tell, this is where the internal cooling fan lives. You can definitely hear it all the time while using Dice. It’s a fairly muffled noise that the internal speakers can easily drown out, but it’s always there.
I/O on Dice is hidden in in its own alcove at the very bottom of the unit. We don’t quite understand why Formovie decided to place the entire I/O panel this way, as it would definitely make plugging and unplugging more difficult.
There aren’t many options either. In addition to the power jack, you also have a 3.5mm audio port, USB 2.0 port that can be used for data transfer, and a USB-to-Ethernet adapter and One HDMI 1.4 port. That’s it. We’d like to see at least a few HDMI inputs from Dice, but maybe it’s just us getting too invested in our portable projector needs.
This cool mesh pattern on the side of the Dice feature is open, at least to some extent. We think this is where the two 5W speakers are located – one on each side. Plus, the overall may also help with ventilation.
Formovie Dice’s Big Top The section is empty, just a small “control strip”. It just contains the power button and an LED that indicates when the device is powered on. We’d really like to see some navigation controls here for Dice and its built-in Android TV. This seems like a major omission.
There are four on the bottom of the dice Very grippy foot. It doesn’t slide or slip at all, which is great. Additionally, the Formovie includes a standard mounting point, so you can place it on a tripod, or mount it on the ceiling (unlikely for a portable product). A nice little touch.
Remote Control The device is quite simple. It includes your basic navigation controls with the back and home buttons below. The leftmost button is for the app drawer. There’s also a Google Assistant button on the remote, but voice pickup and recognition were wildly inaccurate in our tests.
set up
Setting up Formovie Dice is very easy. When the device is turned on, it goes through the process of auto-keystone correction and auto-focus. Both work reasonably well, though the keystone correction does struggle on some surfaces. Autofocus is always accurate. Of course, you can manually adjust the focus and keystone if desired.
Projector Settings
Although you can operate the Android TV 9 environment without logging into a Google account, we recommend logging into one. It can be done entirely on-device or with the help of a smartphone.
Speaking of setup, it’s also important to note that the Formovie Dice supports front and rear projection modes and ceiling mounts using the included attachment points to turn the unit upside down.
Operation
Operating Formovie Dice is very simple. First, you can of course choose to plug in an external HDMI source and use the projector that way. Dice supports HDMI CEC, which is nice to see, but unfortunately there is no Audio Return Channel (ARC) for audio over HDMI.
Support CEC via HDMI 
You can also cast it via the built-in Chromecast Wireless projection. Many will surely rely on the built-in Android TV 9 operating system for content.
The pre-installed Android TV launcher on Formovie Dice is very clean and user-friendly. Absolutely no bloat, and nothing to distract you. You just saw the default channel interface.
Android TV main interface 
The settings menu is also clean and tidy.
We are done with the projector settings menu, so we now go straight to the image related options. The Formovie Dice has three brightness modes – View, which is the default and brightest mode; Eco, which, as the name suggests, reduces the maximum brightness; and Office Mode, which oddly seems to change the color palette of the entire projector rather than Simply change to adjust its brightness.
Image Settings and Brightness
The Dice has quite a few predefined color profiles available. In our humble opinion, the default mode looks like the best of them all. If you really want to fine-tune your picture, you can use user mode. It gives you sliders for brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, and hue, as well as a switch for color temperature and digital noise reduction.
Image Options
Apart from this, Formovie Dice has some general preferences, which are the norm on any Android TV device.
Performance
Let’s start with image quality. Formovie Dice produces very sharp and clean images. It has great colors and no noticeable artifacts like color fringing. It’s very flexible in terms of focal length – in our tests it managed to focus very close and produced a smaller image than advertised 023 inches min. As for the maximum value, we managed to get a workable image measurement 121 inches in Diagonal in a dark room. While Dice is happy to focus larger images, the output isn’t bright enough for it to be useful in any way.
Speaking of brightness, the ad 100 The ANSI lumen numbers seem to be correct for a dark room. Dice is only suitable for casual viewing or quick presentations in a pinch if there is sufficient lighting, and should only be used in moderate lighting environments with screen sizes no larger than
thanks for its native 155 p resolution, Dice has enough detail to display modestly small text. We don’t fully recommend it for anything other than office work, travel, though, due to the limited brightness.
Unfortunately, dice are not very suitable for the game. It has a lot of input lag — too long to be playable for most games. There’s no dedicated game mode, so lag can’t be reduced.
The stereo speakers on the Dice are commendable. Considering their size, these sound surprisingly rich and full, filling a room well. Honestly, for a lot of what we tried, we didn’t find it necessary to connect external speakers to the projector.
Regarding the internals, Formovie Dice runs on an undisclosed chipset with four Cortex-A 023 core, operating at up to 1.4GHz, with 2GB of memory. By all accounts, the specs are modest, but enough to run the Android TV 9 operating system without hiccups and stutters.
Plus the hardware multimedia decoder included in said chipset seems powerful.
We tried the streaming and local playback dice and were not disappointed. In local playback, the projector managed to play every jellyfish sample up to 100 Mbps without dropping frames. Dice is also more than happy to stream 4K content on YouTube, and uses Plex to stream its personal clips at the highest quality in 4K.
Decoder Function
1200
1200 YouTube and Plex Streaming
It’s worth noting that Netflix is not available for Dice in the Google Play Store. However, once we sideloaded the APK, it worked fine.
1920 No Netflix app
Battery life
One of the highlights of Formovie Dice is the fact that it has a built-in 008, 0 mAh battery. The idea is that the internal battery pack makes the product more flexible in terms of use cases. It all comes down to battery life, though, and the Dice’s is far from amazing.
Formovie claims the Dice should last about three hours on a single charge. If you use the dice in Eco mode, the number will check out. If you switch to maximum brightness mode, you can expect up to close to two hours, streaming movies over Wi-Fi and the speakers at about
Two hours is an unstable number, especially When talking about movie watching. Many movies will run longer than they run, and since there’s nothing worse than being cut off midway through a movie with a low battery, we might err on the side of caution and stick to movies under an hour and a half on battery.
Unfortunately, due to the use of a proprietary barrel plug and a non-standard power input
Final Thoughts
All that said, there’s a lot to like about Formovie Dice. It’s reasonably bright for its size and produces very sharp and detailed images. Its autofocus and automatic keystone correction both work well and are reliable. Its speakers are really good and can get pretty loud, thanks to its two 5W speakers. Its Android TV operating system is also very flexible.
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On the other hand, we have to think Know why Formovie went out of their way to put the battery in the Dice and make it compact enough to be “portable”, only to say that the battery only lasts two hours. Maybe there’s a use case we haven’t seen here, but it seems like Formovie Dice is struggling to do too much at once. That doesn’t mean a certain subset of users won’t appreciate the kind of versatility it offers.
