This somehow lacks all geek-appeal to me. It looks like a regular mother board. Not interested.
The raspberry pi on the other hand looks cool. Strange.
VIA launches $49 Android PC
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Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC
#12> Android 2.3 OS sigh . ICS has been out for 6 months now. It's tragic that companies are shipping an ancient 2-year-old OS with their computers.
It's more complicated than that, though. You can't just download ICS and drop it on the board. There are drivers to port and middleware integration to do. Someone has to do that. Google did it for OMAP4 (the Galaxy Nexus), but that's it. This isn't an OMAP4 board, and $50 a unit doesn't pay for a lot of software integration work. This is where the ARM ecosystem tends to fall down. The PC World is built on compatibili…
Canonical and others in the Linux community are working on making a universal kernel for ARM SoC's, and they hope it will work on most of them by 2014. That might help with upgrades and compatibility in the Android world, too, especially since they are planning to merge the Android kernel back into the main Linux kernel.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA0N...
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linux-guru-re-merging-...
Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC
#13PC? How is this thing even close to a PC?
Looks like a motherboard to me,
Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC
#14Interesting how such a large proportion of the the surface area and vertical bulk for these units remainbs devoted to plug connections. It's not too fantastic to imagine such a unit composed virtually of nothing but jacks, etc.
I wonder when the shrinkage is going to start catching up on that end. It's pretty silly looking as it is :)
Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC
#15This is about the price-range I would like to see for a ChromeOS box. Put it in a box I can hide behind a standard monitor, let me reuse the old mouse and keyboard and I can finally throw away the Windows XP PC my in-laws are using for Chrome and Freecell. And use 1/10th of the power.
I'd rather pay more for a high-end Cortex A15-based ChromeBox. Browsing will be very slow on an ARM11 chip, especially if you use it in "desktop mode", which will make it feel even slower compared to using it in a mobile phone. Also, it better have a good GPU, otherwise it won't even support resolutions higher than 800x480 (this one might).
But I do think ChromeOS devices should be somewhere in the $200 price range (or free with contract if you want LTE and plan on using it on the go).
Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC
#16This somehow lacks all geek-appeal to me. It looks like a regular mother board. Not interested. The raspberry pi on the other hand looks cool . Strange.
I feel the opposite.
Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC
#17PC? How is this thing even close to a PC? Looks like a motherboard to me,
It uses solid state storage and the RAM, graphics system, etc. is bundled into the single System-on-a-chip. Plug in the power then hook it up to keyboard/mouse/monitor and you are up and running.
Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC
#18Finally, a cheap ATX-compatible ARM board. Give me PCIe and DIMM slots and I'll be salivating. Equip it with something like a dual-core Cortex chip and I'll be throwing wads of cash in all directions.
I think you're missing the point, it's not about wads of cash, it's about dribbles of cash.
Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC
#19I hope they also have linux distributions for it other than android. If it works with arduino, these could lead to very inexpensive analog/digital controllers.
As long as the distro has drivers for VIA WonderMedia WM8750, it will be fine. Honestly I have no idea if any distros do.
Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC
#20This somehow lacks all geek-appeal to me. It looks like a regular mother board. Not interested. The raspberry pi on the other hand looks cool . Strange.
I'm willing to overlook the geek appeal for the low price. I can see myself building a small NAS or media center with this.
I wonder how difficult it could be to install an ARM version of Linux on it. I'm not that interested in the Android aspect of it, besides maybe using it as a cheap tablet replacement (they'd need to upgrade the Android version though.)