According to the company, most of the upgrades are behind the scenes: a faster CPU, a larger battery (rated lifespan is now four hours), better display quality, and “significantly” better shot tracking. New games are also included, which I’ll cover in the sections to come. Once connected to the web, the Huupe Mini 2 opens up a world of entertainment to you, and, to my great surprise, not all of it is basketball-related.
At first blush, the options available are actually quite daunting. It’s all arranged into traditional tiles on the home screen, which you scroll through with the remote. Just Huupe is the board’s most basic scoring system, tracking shots and recording your shooting percentage in an untimed session.
If you want to get competitive, Huupe Live and the Daily Prize Challenge are social games where you challenge players worldwide to score the most points in a given time frame. The winner gets a nominal prize—10 bucks for the daily challenge, a “cozy sweatsuit” for a monthlong challenge. Other games are fairly self-explanatory, like Most 3 Pointers in 90 Seconds and Family Mode (basically Horse).
Many of the games require online friends to play against; if you don’t have pals with their own Huupe Minis, you’ll probably be locked out of these modes—not that they add much beyond their multiplayer features. Things get a little kookier—and buggier—from there. For example, Huupe Flyers is designed to be played without a ball.
It’s a gesture-based version of Flappy Bird, wherein you literally flap your arms around to keep a basketball in the air, tracking your movements via the camera much like an Xbox Kinect. Unfortunately, unlike the ball-based games, I was never able to play it, as it failed the calibration process every time I tried to fire it up. The system also works as a fairly straightforward streaming platform.
Included are apps for YouTube, HBO Max, ESPN, Disney+, Prime Video, Hulu, Spotify, and more. There’s one glaring omission in that list, of course, and I’m not talking about Paramount+ but rather Netflix. Without Netflix support, can you even call yourself a streaming device?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
