LAS VEGAS—ZTE's Android-powered smart projector, later dubbed the Sprint LivePro, was one of the buzziest products at CES last year. The idea is radical: a little box that can stream Netflix or your business presentations anywhere, at any time, onto anything.

But it wasn't explained well. ZTE called it a "projector hotspot," which nobody really understood; the hotspot part was actually the least interesting thing about it. So with this year's upgrade, the Spro 2, ZTE is making things much clearer.

"We confused ourselves," said Lixin Cheng, CEO of ZTE USA. "We have to make it very clear that this is a smart projector. People are familiar with a smart TV and a smartphone. This is a new category we created, the smart projector. People want to take their big-screen TV anywhere, and stream video anywhere they want—that's really the key," he said.

The Spro 2 rethinks the whole thing, in very attractive ways. The LivePro basically acted like a projector with an Android tablet tacked to the top. The Android UI wasn't great for a projector. The Spro 2 has a customized interface with large blocks of color that are easier to see and tap on from arm's length, and that foregrounds the projector features. It also comes with a remote. While it's still running Android 4.4.2, and can run any Android apps, it looks a little like Windows Phone.

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It's twice as bright as the previous unit—200 lumens as opposed to 100—runs for twice as long on its battery, 3 hours rather than 90 minutes—and has some neat features like auto-keystoning, which snaps the image back to a rectangle when you move it around onto different surfaces.

There's a new processor, a 2.1GHz Snapdragon 800, as well as a 5-inch, 1,280-by-820 touch screen, a 6,300mAh battery, and 16GB of storage. Inputs here are great - with MicroSD, HDMI and USB in, you can project from a memory card, a USB stick or a video source.

I watched a few movie trailers on the Spro 2 and everything looked bright and sharp. The real advantage over the previous model, to me, is how streamlined the interface has become: It's much, much easier to control the projector, jump to video and office apps and start showing things.

The Spro 2 is coming to a "major U.S. wireless carrier" that isn't Sprint. That'll be interesting.

For more, check out PCMag's Hands On With the ZTE Grand X Max + and Star II Phones.