Review: Kandao Meeting Ultra
A VC appliance that lays all its credentials on the table.
22 July 2025
Review:/ Christopher Holder
Rolling out Teams rooms is a full-time job for many AV professionals and the AV design for the typical room personas seems largely settled: Small huddle spaces of four people or less get a booth and a video bar with a display. Medium sized spaces get two PTZ cameras, a big screen and a microphone ceiling array. Larger spaces and board rooms get more cameras down the side of the rooms, two ceiling tiles and multiple displays. Rinse and repeat.
Kandao was one of the first to posit an alternative approach. Why not put the camera, speaker and mics in the middle of the table?
This was around five years ago and if Kandao wasn’t the first to market, it certainly was the first product of its type that I saw. Others followed, including from Maxhub and more recently Logitech.
ON THE TABLE
There are a couple of advantages in putting the AV on the table: from a video perspective, you can get a camera that’s closer to head height in front of participants’ faces. From an audio perspective, the microphones are much closer to the source. From a loudspeaker perspective, you can keep levels lower, which doesn’t excite the space unnecessarily.
The on-table format works especially well when the meeting is, say, 80% in the room. Let me explain:
If you have six or eight people around a table and one or two people chiming in remotely, then naturally, most of the discussion is around the table. As one work-from-home professional once confided in me: when you join a meeting from home everyone faces you and says hello and from then on you just see the sides of their heads as they conduct the meeting amongst each other around the table. In other words, it can be isolating and exclusionary for those on the far end.
But with the mid-table approach, those at the far end get face-on contact with everyone around the table – if the camera and processing is up to the task.
AGE OF ULTRA
Kandao has now further refined its approach by releasing a model in its Meeting range with integrated HD displays. Meeting Ultra combines a 360° camera, eight-element mic array, 10W loudspeaker and two touchscreens for an all-in-one VC appliance that means an in-room meeting can be naturally conducted without recourse to a front-of-room display, while those on the far end feel involved and included.
The two 15.6-inch touchscreens are the most conspicuous distinguishing feature of the Meeting Ultra. They allow you to mediate all aspects of the call without recourse to a laptop. The system ships with a remote controller but in my time with Meeting Ultra it wasn’t required.
UNBOXING ULTRA
As soon as I pulled Meeting Ultra out of the box the system felt ‘right sized’ to me. The displays are about the size of a big laptop and don’t need to be larger in my view. You can connect the unit to one or two external screens if you so desire via the two HDMI ports. And for larger spaces this might be the perfect combination.
The Meeting Ultra boots up with Android as the operating system. Actually, if it helps you to get your head around this unit, you can think of it as an Android device on steroids. You can download apps from Google Marketplace like a tablet. And you launch the apps in the way that you’d expect.
I think Meeting Ultra really comes into its own when it natively hosting the call. In my tests I logged into Teams and Zoom with my credentials. In a commercial context it might be logged in as Meeting Room A. Because its entirely self contained you don’t need a control system to launch the call on the in-room PC, it’s all within the Meeting Ultra. Hit Join and away you go.
You can of course bring your own meeting. The best way is to connect to Meeting Ultra via the USB-C port and select it as your microphone, loudspeaker and camera, then mirror your display. You can use wi-fi.
360 MAGIC
The 360 camera is where most of the magic happens. It frames up the occupants around the table. The tracking is smooth and responsive. It means that someone presenting at the front of the room can have the freedom to pace the front of the room and be actively tracked. There’s even a preconfigured view that provides that person with more screen real estate for those at the other end of the call. Try doing that with a conventional set up with 2 x PTZ at under the big screen.
NO OBJECTIONS
I’ve been using Meeting Ultra for a while now and I’m beginning to run out of objections as to why it’s not the best possible way of cracking the mid-sized hybrid meeting room nut.
It is Zoom certified but not Teams certified, which will automatically disqualify it from many BOMs. I guess the way I see it, is it’s basically a Microsoft Android-powered gadget. I dunno, is a Samsung tablet Teams certified?
For jobs where the certification makes no difference, perhaps for any small to medium sized enterprise that might have one decent-sized space to conduct in-person and hybrid meetings, the Meeting Ultra drops straight in with zero configuration time and offers a superior experience. You can even run it via PoE, which cleans up the cable mess on the table quite considerably.
The other objection is the fact Kandao is hardly the first name in commercial AV. True, but it is a pioneer in this particular tech and is backed by credible wholesaler in Auroz.
Worth a try, I’d suggest.
Auroz: auroz.com
FEATURES
Screens:
15.6-inch LCD
Dual 10-point capacitive touch
1920 x 1080 @60Hz
Camera:
Resolution: 3840 x 2160 @ 30fps / 1920 x 1080 @30fps / 1280 x 720 @ 30fps
Format: MJPEG / H.264
Microphone:
8 x omni beamforming elements
Pickup Range: 5.5m
Sensitivity: -38dB ±1dB @1kHz
AEC: Supported
Noise Cancellation: Supported
Loudspeaker:
Power: 10W
Ports:
USB-C: USB 3.1 for computer connection
USB-C power power input
Ethernet: Gigabit Ethernet for wired network and PoE
USB-A x 3: mouse, keyboard etc
HDMI x 2: Screen extension and audio/video computer input
Wi-fi: 2.4+5G, wi-fi 6
Bluetooth: Bluetooth 5.0
RESPONSES