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VIA launches $49 Android PC

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Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC

#3
4 watts when idle

no power management? my standard voltage laptop with a spinning disk, screen and low backlighting idles at 6-7.

And can you really get away with no HS/F at 13 watts under load?

Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC

#4
Finally, 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.

Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC

#6
This 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.

Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC

#9
post #4

Finally, 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.

Why not just buy any number of Atom or Fusion motherboards out there? Cost is in the same realm as what you're asking for and they already have those slots. Power consumption isn't much more than the ARMs, but there's actual product you can buy today.

If you don't mind waiting a bit, see Freescale iMX6: http://boundarydevices.com/products-2/nitrogen6x-board-imx6-...

Re: VIA launches $49 Android PC

#10
post #7

> 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 compatibility. No one can ship a board if it doesn't run Windows (or even DOS, frankly). Graphics cards have VESA and VGA fallback modes so that you can bootstrap a driver installation. And as a result the Linux community can leverage this to provide pretty great support for new hardware, even if it starts out as a fallback or partial implementation for a few versions. None of that exists in the SoC world.

So if VIA or NVIDIA or Samsung or Qualcomm want ICS to run on their chips, they need to do the work. So far they have not. Nor have their customers been willing or able to.

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