I guess we have to wait for the summer/autumn models for the upgraded MediaTek chip.
I am not so sure about that. MT5597 only seems to be adding Dolby Vision. According to sources it is the same quad core ARM Cortex A53 design as last year's MT5596 and Sony is developing a SW/FPGA solution for Dolby Vision anyway which will also come to the ZD9...
One addition that is worth highlighting, however, is Amazon.
Shouldn't it come to the Play Store soon? At least nVIDIA and Philips announced support for Amazon Video. But they might only be paying the license fees to have Amazon on their devices now too...
Amazon on Sony is a total pain though. Have you ever watched The Grand Tour in 4K with Dolby 5.1 passthrough? Totally jerky with async audio. The quality of the Amazon app is pretty bad compared to Netflix.
One of the new features in Android 6.0 is the addition of the input "streaming" that embeds content from streaming services and presents it as traditional flow TV.
That has always been there. You just needed to install an app which implemented the Google TV Input Framework (like Bloomberg). Google Play Movies now supports it. That's why you already see it with stock FW.
Be aware that the TV has only 1 CI port, meaning that you cannot record an encrypted channel while watching another. One of them has to be unencrypted, in which case all features are available.
This is not entirely true. If you watch or record an FTA channel, the CI already gets assigned to it. So you can't watch/record a scrambled channel in parallel anymore.
One thing worth remembering is that if you want to be able to turn on the TV via the smartphone/tablet app it will cost you 20W in standby usage. This is certainly not an insignificant amount for some added convenience.
That's also not the full story. No matter whether you enable or disable
Remote start, the TV won't go to deep sleep for a very long time. It might be doing "maintenance work" (like service and EPG scan) for several hours and also often wakes up from deep sleep. The whole standby behavior of the Sony TVs is a total mess. It is totally not acceptable!
we hereby give it our Highly Recommended Award
Beside image quality, I consider Live TV and the Smart TV capabilities to be important aspects. And I am quite sure that the majority of people are fine with an IPS display but care much more about the functional aspects. So I am providing my own review which details those, see
The Sony Android TV Experience (Marshmallow/2017).