VIA APC (Android PC) - $50

[Havantgottaclue]

Yet another mini PC - this one is seen as a competitor to the Raspberry Pi, running from an 800MHz CPU with Android 2.3 installed, costing just $50.

It also sports the world's shortest web URL (probably not true, but still).

http://apc.io/

I also find that it's always useful to compare a computer board to a banana, so imagine how pleased I was to find this photo on the site:

[zapiy]

That look sweet but the market is becoming muggy..

[Havantgottaclue]

Yeah, there are certainly a lot of gadgets kicking about. I probably shouldn't really be eyeing this one up since I've spent precious little time on the RasPi and haven't got much time to spare on yet another mini computer.

Still, it has captured my interest somewhat - it's a little different from the RasPi and the Android-based mini-PCs in that the CPU appears to be x86 rather than ARM. VIA bought Cyrix some years ago, which of course was for a while part of a three-horse race in the desktop PC market along with Intel and AMD. So it looks as though the CPU in this is a successor of sorts to the Cyrix CPU.

[zapiy]

Same as, I really want to get involved in this area but time holds me back sadly. Never the less I shall keep an eye on it.

[Havantgottaclue]

I've now had a read of an article on this in Linux User & Developer. They say that the CPU is in fact an ARM chip after all, so it looks as though I misinterpreted the information on the website. It's an ARM v6 just like the RasPi and is only 100MHz but they say that it outperforms RasPi significantly, which seems odd. However, they do say that you need to get rid of the default Android 2.3 installation and put Linux on it instead, as Android 2.3 is very clunky, apparently. Not surprising really.

LU&D also said that the graphics chip is nowhere near as good as RasPi's, which is quite worrying. After all, one of the things that was said about the RasPi was that XWindows could be optimised to use the GPU more and make for a smoother desktop experience. I don't know whether that's happened yet, but if the APC's GPU is weak, that's not going to be something they can do with this piece of kit.

All in all, I think I will probably give this a miss for now. The Parallella board looks more promising.