When you hear of Patriot Memory, what’s the first thing to comes to mind. Maybe it’s their RAM. Maybe it’s their SSDs. Maybe it’s their flash drives. But also have a little gem of a device called the Patriot Box Office.

I reviewed the original Patriot Box Office a couple of years ago and now they have a brand new version in the works called the Box Office Alpine. The biggest difference? It runs on Google Android.

As you may recall, one of my gripes about the first PBO was the user interface. It was on the clunkier side of things, even though the idea of plunking an optional 2.5-inch hard drive inside seemed pretty smart at the time. From what I hear, the PBO Alpine will come loaded with Android 2.2 Froyo, though that might change between now and then.

Of course, Android is going to be heavily skinned for it to be usable on a media streaming box like the Patriot Box Office. Hopefully the skin is better than the random no-name Chinese companies that have tried to produce Android media players.

The growth of Google Android has been huge, showing up in smartphones, tablets, refrigerators, and more. Now, we’re going to see it in a media player, which seems like a really good fit.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that Patriot hasn’t received the proper licensing for access to Android Market yet, so you may not be able to get your favorite apps onto this set-top box. I’m sure the guys at XDA will come up with something for side-loading apps though.

Details are scarce, but Patriot tells us that the Alpine should ship this fall. As before, it’ll have an internal hard drive dock, online streaming support, and other goodies.