81–90 of 189 posts
I'm trying to figure out what in the world people are going to use these for. Single-app kiosk? Sure, but that's gotta be a tiny market. TV streaming box? Maybe, but it's not clear to me that it really offers anything I care about that isn't already done by Chromecast/Roku. I dunno. It's kind of a cool idea, but it feels like a solution in search of a problem.
The killer could be the possibility to turn it into a Steam machine.
What I'm after is something that can run Kodi (xbmc) which links to a NAS for its media. Running Netflix is a nice to have. What devices are out there that I can use for this purpose? At the moment I have a fairly heavy htpc running Windows, but I have more tvs that I would like to use for similar purposes. Edit: Bonus if it can do 4k video, but 1080p minimum is a must.
You also have the option of Amazon FireTV or Fire Stick. http://kodi.wiki/view/Amazon_Fire_TV You can enjoy netflix, amazon prime, hulu, etc and install Kodi. Although you have to go through an extra step to install it. Amazon removed Kodi from its store officially. It otherwise plays exactly like an HTPC. Everything I threw at it played fine. The only downside is that it does not support HD audio passthrough. http:/…
Maybe they've fixed it, but it was like this half a year ago when I had a FireTV stick.
More specs at anandtech http://www.anandtech.com/show/9797/asus-launches-the-chromeb... Its Mali T764 GPU seems more powerful than an xbox360: the T760 has 326 GFLOPS; xbox360 xenos GPU has about 240 GFLOPS. Not sure what difference the 4 in 764 makes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_(GPU) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenos_(graphics_chip) These PC sticks have been around for years... I wonder if the killer a…
There is Intel's Compute Stick too[1] but I haven't try it yet. [1] http://www.intel.com/buy/us/en/product/desktop/intel-boxstck...
A few ideas how to make it better: - include a small screen so I can still do stuff even if I don't have TV at hand - use touch screen so I can use it without mouse / keyboard too - use Android instead of Chrome OS so I can play games with it - while you are at it, can this thing make phone calls too? In other words, why not just make it simple to plug an Android smartphone to peripherals (screen, mouse, keyboard)? T…
It's possible that neither ASUS or Google considered the option of making a mobile phone, but this seems unlikely. It's equally unlikely they could develop the same kind of CPU/AV grunt along with the features you want and still ship at USD$85.
To your other questions - there's one USB port because this is intended to plug into something else (specifically using HDMI), and not have a deskload worth of cruft plugged in to it. As observed in the article most people will use BT mouse & keyboard. Network (802.11ac) is built in. What use more USB?
Bootloader? Can we use our own? Network settings? Is this like Chromecast where they try to prevent the user from changing them (gateway, DNS, etc.)?
network settings: like every Chrome OS device it defaults to DHCP with whatever comes through that (incl. DNS), but can be manually configured.
Kudos to Google for building this one, but I've gotta wonder what drove the decision to use Rockchip. I'll be very interested if firmware flashing tools / kernel sources become available for this.
As for Linux, other veyron devices (that's the RK3288 family of Chrome OS systems) are already supported in upstream (look for veyron on http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/arch/arm/boot/dts/), so I expect that this will follow as soon as the Linux development process allows.
I'm trying to figure out what in the world people are going to use these for. Single-app kiosk? Sure, but that's gotta be a tiny market. TV streaming box? Maybe, but it's not clear to me that it really offers anything I care about that isn't already done by Chromecast/Roku. I dunno. It's kind of a cool idea, but it feels like a solution in search of a problem.
How good is it as a gaming device? The killer could be the possibility to turn it into a Steam machine.
[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Intel-Compute-Stick-Windows-Upgrade/...
I wonder how much it shares with the cromecast, and whether (possibly) being able to hack at this, will open up the chromecast a little. Should be interesting to watch, since I expect there might be a few spare chromecasts lying around now ;-)
Chromecast has very different lineage.
I'm trying to figure out what in the world people are going to use these for. Single-app kiosk? Sure, but that's gotta be a tiny market. TV streaming box? Maybe, but it's not clear to me that it really offers anything I care about that isn't already done by Chromecast/Roku. I dunno. It's kind of a cool idea, but it feels like a solution in search of a problem.
Not relevant for this one, but I've been keeping my eye on this market since it has cheap x86 devices for doing dynamic malware analysis on real hardware, rather than VMs which can be detected. Sadly I haven't seen anything with PXE or Intel's network boot tech, which would make life a lot easier, but maybe I can flash one.
I might get this one to manage app store uploads/SaaS deployments for some side projects, since having all my key material isolated on a totally separate computer would make me feel a lot better that other people won't get as easily hacked if I mess up the security of my dev machine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is a demographic of casual internet users who might be interested in this product. It's inexpensive and occupies little space, one need only provide peripherals and a monitor. It runs ChromeOS, which is reputed to be very secure (except from Google) and easy to use. Yes, the kiosk application seems of dubious value, if only because people tend to prefer touchscreen kiosks. But I don't believe you are co…
Although, cheap computers are certainly not hard to come by. A Thinkpad T60 is about $60 used, and its performance is similar to this device.
I know this situation since my mother falls into this camp. When she last moved I tried to convince her to buy a laptop, but she refused. Later I got her Chromebook which she likes on travels, but still refused to use at home, but continuously complains how slow her desktop is.
I'm seriously considering if getting one of these for her would fix the situation. She could still use her old keyboard, mouse and display, but I bet performance would go through the roof (compared to her old PC), but I don't know how compatible things like printers and scanners are with this and would running mouse, keyboard, printer, scanner and external HDD off of same USB port introduce some bottlenecking