Once in a while you run into the oddest companies at trade shows and although Korean Valueplus isn't that odd in itself, as it's a manufacturer of a wide range of Android powered media players, but its retail branding which is TizzBird, is rather odd. Still, the company has some interesting products and its latest addition is the Stick N1, an HDMI adapter that turns your dumb TV into a smart TV.
The TizzBird Stick N1 sports a Cortex-A5 based ARM SoC from Telechips which operates at 1GHz which has been paired up with 4GB of internal NAND flash and 2GB of RAM in a fairly small dongle that slots into the HDMI port of your TV. The dongle also has a USB 2.0 port for external storage devices or wireless keyboards and mice, a micro USB port for power, a micro SD card slot and integrated 802.11n Wi-Fi. The company is also contemplating adding support for an RF remote, but this wasn't ready at the show.
Valueplus has created a custom UI on top of Android 4.0 for the Stick N1 and it was all very smooth in operation, although we're not sure it's the most intuitive UI out there. That said, it beats the budget Android media players from China that lacks any kind of UI at all. The Stick N1 supports HDMI 1.4 and will play just about any video and audio formats you throw at it, including Blu-ray, although we're not sure about 3D content. You can also use the standard Android UI and the Stick N1 supports user installed apps, although this is apparently only via the TizzBird Appstore.
Other software features include support for NFS, Samba and uPnP and Flash support. Valueplus will also offer an iPhone and Android app that allows you to use your smartphone as the remote control for the TizzBird Stick N1. It's the most retail ready product of its kind we've seen so far, but we have a feeling that there will be a lot of competition in this market space this year with several other players working on getting their products out onto the market. Price wise the Stick N1 should cost around US$150 (S$185) when it launches later this year.

Read more: Valueplus shows off the TizzBird Stick N1 at CeBIT by VR-Zone.com