Gooseberry Launches Android-based Raspberry Pi Rival

By Douglas Perry
published

There is now an option next to the Raspberry Pi

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.

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26 Comments Comment from the forums
  • EDVINASM
    Will somebody put it in a nice neat box and install Linux with Open Office and then sell it? I am bored with this 80's hardware 'news' that looks like from garage sale. Surely nice neat Solidworks engineered and moulded case can be made for below £5..
    Reply
  • kawininjazx
    Since I got my Nexus 7 Rooted and working with my PS3 controller and all the emulators, I want to get one of these android boxes with micro-HDMI and hook it into my TV as a classic game console. The price is good, also waiting for that rumored console to come out.
    Reply
  • tomsreader
    blackberry, gooseberry, raspberry, many more to come...
    Reply
  • silverblue
    It's amazing to see so many of these sorts of devices being launched. £40 for something like this isn't a bad deal at all if you really wanted to have a tiny machine able to run Linux and at a fraction of the power consumption of a standard PC. Still, the lack of analogue video is a bit of a concern, but so many people are sporting HDMI-equipped TVs, for example, meaning you can just hook it up to that. It's much larger than the Pi, but that's hardly surprising given the improved specs, plus the Pi was so small to begin with that you couldn't possibly complain about the Gooseberry.

    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/
    Reply
  • booyaah
    I'm currently making one of these boards. I've code-named it 'Dingleberry'.
    Reply
  • freggo
    "lacks a LAN"... sorry, I'd rather skip on WIFI.

    Reply
  • C12Friedman
    10423761 said:
    I'm currently making one of these boards. I've code-named it 'Dingleberry'.
    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.
    Reply
  • silverblue
    Then go to the actual Gooseberry website via the source link at the top, click on the image you wish to view, then when the page for that image appears, click the image again for a larger version.
    Reply
  • 11796pcs
    C12FriedmanI'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.
    Reply
  • Cantisque
    This looks suspiciously similar to those chipsets you see in all those tacky cheap Android tablets.
    Reply