Gooseberry Launches Android-based Raspberry Pi Rival
The Gooseberry Board was announced in a limited production run of 500 units and comes with a 1 GHz overclockable A10 processor, a 400 MHz Mali processor, 4 GB of on-board storage as well as Android 4.03 ICS.
The manufacturer claims that the Gooseberry is "roughly 3 x more powerful in processing power", and twice the RAM (512 MB) than the Raspberry Pi. The Gooseberry does not come with analog video and lacks a LAN port, but supports Wi-Fi. At this time, the board only supports Android 4 ICS and Ubuntu without graphics acceleration. However, Gooseberry is offering premade images for Ubuntu. Support for Arch Linux ARM is "expected in the future".
The Gooseberry Board is offered for 40 British pounds, which translates to about $62. However, the board was sold out within a few hours after launch and there was no information if and when more supply will come online.
The source link has a few more images that you can see in much better detail. I think the only disadvantage I can see thus far is the use of a mini-USB port instead of micro-USB. Please note that the A10 is a single-core CPU.
There seems to be a few actual complete devices out there using similar specs. Check this out:
http://www.lyxfsz.com/cn/products_view.htm?id=24
The A10 CPU itself:
http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/
I'm gonna buy one too. lol.
I'm not thrilled with the picture used in the article - no sense of scale and when I tried to zoom, it was the same size picture.
I still haven't figured out a good reason I should purchase a tablet let alone a micro pc.
It's cool. That's about the only reason. The nice thing about the Raspberry Pi is that it's so cheap that why wouldn't you buy one.
I checked out their website, basically it is one of those chipsets you find in tacky, cheap android tablets. It also doesn't have GPIO, which is a major selling point for the Raspberry.
For another £10 you can buy one of these things built into a usable tablet, complete with case, power supply and 7" resistive touch LCD screen off ebay.
Medfield. Maybe there will be such a small x86 board with Medfield. I'm not convinced that it will be done, but I suppose that it could be done and that it could make sense. Something like that could probably have enough performance to run even a full Windows XP installation if it has driver support.
Didn't Android recently pass iPhones as the majority in the smart phone market? Besides, Blackberry is still around and regardless, this has nothing to do with them.
It may not be fashionable anymore, but at one point it certainly was, especially with the younger adults over here in the UK.
I'd be going for that one.... but the maintenance costs are going to be real high.... plus I see no connectivity issue with this one.
"Another option" would be more appropriate than "competitor".
The idea of it having no case, no SD and no software is to make it as cheap and flexible as possible rather than trying to do the usual one-size-fits-all approach. I didn't want a case as it was being embedded into a space so having the case would have meant extra cost and time for me. Want a case? www.modmypi.com lets you choose separate colours for each part. Not something you could do with an included case. As for software, I played a little with XBMC and then replaced it with a command line Linux. Again another example where a UI Linux and pre-selected software would have been useless.