90% if not more of the brands out there are OEM brands: distributors that have a box made, usually from a pre-existing design, with their own logo (and sometimes a different casing).
There are only a few hardware manufacturers, mainly in china.
Now that Broadcom seems to have left the OEM market for SoC chipsets, the only one left (that we support) is HiSilicon, a Huawei brand.
Most boxes on the market therefore use the same few SoC's that are available, and the design and features are all similar.
As for the SF8008, it is identical to the Gigablue Trio 4K, the Ustym 4K Pro, and I'm pretty sure the Qviart Dual and the Zgemma H9 too (if not, the slept in the same bed
). In many cases, the only difference is drivers (as the SDK is supplied by the manifacturer, but the OEM needs to compile and tune the drivers themselfs).
Octagon is a brand focussing on Germany, hardware that in many other countries is branded Mutant (the Octagon AX series is the same as the Mutant HD series).
I think VU+ is struggling with what to do at the moment, as they were a large and dedicated Broadcom customer, and since they're not bsaed in China, I wonder if they will make the switch to HiSilicon too...
The box seem very powerful, but to be honest i don't like Huawei, for example on routers i am using Netgear, Linksys since many years, and since i went on fiber i got a Huawei echolife hg8245h (Gpon), when i tried to upgrade the gpon with latest huawei firmware, i asked Huawei by mail for the firmware (nothing was on their support site), they refused and sent me to my provider. More than this, they keep hidden the router real root account, the login password they give us is a user account. I changed the superuser login and password but my ISP were able to distantly reset the Huawei Gpon, meaning Huawei keep backdoors in their products.
I really not feel confident with that.
