As it seemed that I’d never get my mittens on a Raspberry pi I decided to look for alternatives. I stumbled over this little Chinese ARM pc / media center. What is interesting about this little guy is the fact that the A10 + Mali400 platform is quite open , plus the device is completely unbrickable.
Specs wise it’s in another league compered to the PI.
Cpu is a cortex A8 1.0 ghz , overclockable to 1.5 ghz. For the Mali gpu there is already an open source driver effort going on.
512 mb RAM , 306 mb for OS and 206 for GPU.
It has 3 usb ports , one optical out for sound , RCA video out , VGA out , HDMI out. One more usb port unused on the board.
There is an Ethernet port , realteck wifi b/g/n chip , SD/SDHC slot.
And my favorite , a slot for any 2.5 inch SATA hard disk.
The price is quite low , 115 usd with shipping to Romania. For US the shipping might be lower. The device itself is 70 usd.
More info here : http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/04/04/mele-a2000-android-2-3-media-player-powered-by-allwinner-a10/
I already got Ubuntu and Debian up and running on it. For the Android fans it ships with 2.3 and there is a 4.0 ROM out there.
My suggestion was to have as small fund raiser to get something like this for the developers that would like to port Haiku to ARM. This seems a more interesting device then the PI.
Would anyone be interested in this ?
More info : http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/hacking_the_mele_a1000/
http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/
http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/
Place where I got mine : http://www.aliexpress.com/snapshot/106689708.html