Recommended reading

Kaser Net'sPC2 YF810-8G Review: $100 For An Android Nettop?

Features
By , published

What’s the cheapest computer you can buy today? And we're not talking Raspberry Pi. We still need enough horsepower to email, browse the Web, or play a movie. Kaser claims to have the answer with its $100 Android-based nettop. But is it up to the task?

Brave New World, Or Wretched Dystopia?

Both the half-priced LG burner and the Nexus 7 are noticeably more responsive at basically every task than the Kaser. We didn’t need benchmarks, or even a stopwatch to gauge this. It is abundantly clear. Moreover, as touchscreen-based devices, the Gingerbread-based smartphone and Nexus work very well with Android. Whereas the Kaser’s oversized, touch-friendly buttons are totally unnecessary when used in conjunction with a mouse. Throw in the touchscreen-optimized UI controls and the need to constantly pretend that your mouse is your fingertip, and it’s pretty apparent that Ice Cream Sandwich just isn’t suited to the PC input paradigm.

Adding insult to injury, the Net'sPC2 is completely and overwhelmingly out-gunned by the PC that you probably already own and don’t use anymore. What’s that? Post-PC era, you say? Right.

In short, the Kaser Net'sPC2 YF810-8G is not something we can recommend. The desktop and Android don’t play very well together in the first place, and using the cheapest components known to man in order to hit the $100 price point doesn’t help things at all. By trying to be an Android-based PC, the Net'sPC2 loses the convenience and portability of Android, while simultaneously losing the power and performance of the PC.

Though the included VESA mount may encourage you to turn the YF810-8G into a cheap HTPC, that’s not happening either. And the headless re-purposing options are equally non-existent.

It’s not very often that we come across a product with absolutely zero value and no saving graces, but this is one of those times. The only thing that Kaser's Net'sPC2 YF810-8G is good for is burning through one hundred dollars. Honestly, you’d be more satisfied by ten buckets of the Colonel’s chicken.

26 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Matsushima
    Seriously? Another slow ARM processor with a bloated phone OS on a desktop. Tragic.
    Reply
  • Matsushima
    I have something like that, a bloated Android HTPC that looks a bit like Raspberry Pi.
    Reply
  • dingo07
    How about adding it to the NAV system in a 2006 Acura TL that has a 7" touchscreen?
    Reply
  • Firion87
    Now AMD's APU is incredibly cheap, add 1g of ram a hdd lying around your home and your way better off with a x86 than this underpowered NO FLASH compatible no nothing system. Why are they even talking about such systems? I'm an Intel fanboy but got a AMD e350 system for my parents. I am amazed how well that little thing works for pretty much anything you encounter in daily use for little money (hdd 120g second hand, case and psu can be purchased for as little as 35$, mb+ram 65$ brand new)
    Reply
  • ET3D
    Wow, this is really overpriced or underspecced or both. The Allwinner A10 is simply a crappy chip. Single core Cortex A8, 16-bit RAM interface, 512MB limitation, that's pretty crap. I bought a Chinese tablet (Onda V712) for $125 with a quad core A7, 2GB of RAM and an 1280x800 IPS screen, so if you drop the screen I imagine this could all be put into $100, and provide much better performance. (It's about as powerful as the Nexus 7, a little slower on the CPU side and faster on the GPU side.)
    As for Android, it should also be possible to make it more usable. A better specced device would have 1080p native, and allowing to change DPI settings on the fly is likely to do wonders to usability on a bit screen (i.e., scale the UI instead of blowing it up).
    Android also has some limited windows. It's a hack, but there are apps which support it, such as Tiny Apps, which provides a notes app, calculator, paint, music player and music recorder all running in their own small windows. There are also floating video players ("floating" is the Android app way of saying "windowed") and floating web browsers.
    I think that an Android PC could be made usable (though not great). This one isn't it, and I feel that testing was too limited, but I won't fault you for it because any A10 device is not really worth a second look.
    Reply
  • ET3D
    I checked out some Chinese stores, and indeed it's possible to buy something specced link my tablet (Allwinner A31, 2GB RAM, ...) for $90, and some dual core A9 1GB devices in the $80-$100 range. These should be much better than this particular piece of crap.
    Reply
  • Aljhon Pobar
    "armed with a single Cortex-A8 core running at 1.0 GHz. For a little perspective, that's about half of the processing power wielded by the original iPad. "
    How come? 1st Gen iPad is powered by Apple A4 SoC which uses a 1GHz Cortex A8. And this Allwiner A10 is powered by the same Cortex A8.
    This is very disappointing for a well known techsite.
    Reply
  • obarthelemy
    how did you manage to select such a crappy representative of Android PCs, when for example the similarly priced Minix Neo X5 is several times more powerful and has an excellent, frequently updated OS ?
    Reply
  • ET3D
    G-Box Midnight MX2 is another good choice you might want to review. Serves as a good XBMC player out of the box, but can be used as an Android mini PC.
    Reply
  • joebob2000
    About 6 months ago I picked up a dual CPU/quad GPU android PC stick, for $50 shipped. It lacks hardware ethernet or the plethora of USB ports, but it is pretty darn fast for how cheap it is. I suspect Kaser was the first of the "android pc" vendors to submit something to Tom's but is it too hard to hit up Aliexpress for comparable priced units?
    Reply