I just stumbled across this delightful little box of tricks and although it isn’t quite in keeping I thought I’d share it anyway. Android set top boxes (or media players if you prefer) are nothing new, but I’ve never seen one quite so small and pleasing on the eye. I wanted one as soon as I saw the photograph, and the price has all but cemented it.
The innards might be fairly familiar – it’s an AllWinner A10 which is a Cortex A8 @ ~1.2Ghz built on a 55nm process, a Mali400 GPU @ ~300Mhz and 512MB of RAM. Connections include 1080p HDMI to your TV, mini USB, OTG USB and a Micro SD slot. Also inside is a Wireless 802.11 b/g chip.
The idea I suppose is to grab a HDMI cable and convert your idiot TV into a smart TV with the aid of a wireless mouse and keyboard. And for $74 shipped it’s a good price too. Not as good as the Raspberry Pi perhaps, but probably more powerful and of course it’s running Android instead of Debian – which you could argue is better suited to the lounge TV.
It’s available at AliExpress, for those interested.
Just ordered one of these little fellows yesterday but picked the 1GB Ram version. The Lenovo mouse as a controller seems to work fine and doesn’t even look too bad.
I found this blog via gbatemp (in search for the K1 GBA) and love it! So many wonderful gadgets. 🙂
Thanks for your kind words! May I ask, where have you seen the 1GB version for sale? I saw that lightake.com have the 512MB version for $73.99 (http://lightake.com/detail.do/sku.Pre_order_AK802_Android_4.0_Mini_PC_512MB_4GB_A10_Cortex_A8_Google_TV_Player_Black-54358)but I’d be willing to pay a little more for a bumped spec.
I went through your link to aliexpress and did a little searchi. Finally I came up with this offer here which seems pretty good to me:
http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/569607164-Fast-Shipping-MK802-Android4-0-IPTV-Mini-Android-4-0-PC-android-box-1G-RAM-2-wholesalers.html
Good find!
I ordered one last week. Very interesting. The build in Wifi makes it more versatile than the RasPi. I’ll put up a comparing review when I get the package.
I’d buy this if I could plug in my 4TB external drive and play DVD ISOs
WHo says you can’t?
I saw this posted on Digg today. Interesting little device indeed. In one of the comments I read, a guy had the idea that a similar device could be made cheaply and inserted into a screen (think similar to the padfone). This would mean that the CPU, ram etc could be upgraded on a tablet without the need of buying another expensive frame and chassis. Would love to see that put into action.
That is a great idea…