Boxee Box up for preorder, switches to Intel Atom

By Nick Mokey September 13, 2010

As if the impending launch of a revamped $99 Apple TV and Google TV this fall weren’t enough, the long-awaited D-Link Boxee Box has lurched out of hibernation with even more muscle, and you can finally get in line for one.

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen announced that the Boxee Box would retail for $199 earlier this month, as a sort of rebuttal to the new Apple TV launch, but on Monday, the Box hit Amazon.com for the first time. Its preorder availability coincided with an announcement that developers had ditched the previous Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset in favor of Intel’s Atom CE4100 – the same silicon supplying the power behind upcoming Google TV systems, like Logitech’s Revue.

According to the D-Link press release, “The new chip lets the Boxee Box deliver a wide range of applications and ensures support for 1080p content, no matter the source,” suggesting the Tegra 2 may not have offered the same video format flexibility. Boxee has long promoted the Boxee Box as one of the few set-top streamers capable of handling all major video codecs, short of DRM-encrypted ones like those used by the iTunes store.

Boxee’s press release claims the Boxee Box will begin shipping in November, just in time for the holiday season.

Check out our hands-on first impressions of the Boxee Box from CES 2010, and a side-by-side comparison with the new Apple TV and other media streamers.

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