What's interesting is how lagged the development world is from the consumer electronics world. If you want an Allwinner A10, or a Marvell Kirkwood/ ARMADA 300 piece of kit, and you want it at the best possible price, possibly before dev kits show up, you need to scope out consumer electronics, not dev boards. The Mele was a product, this lack's the consumer experience of a product, is just a platform, and it, like many dev kits, show lag v.s. what the consumer boys are up to.
This is simply a small board exposing a very cheap ARM A8 SoC that does everything (just add ram+flash): hold on to your fucking pants and get used to the future. Course, may not materialize. My OpenPandora hasn't. ;)
I have two Open Pandoras that say you Just Need To Wait A Little More (tm). ;)
And yeah, seems like every few years we get more and more college grads who seem to be surprised that there is, in fact, a lot of very cheap hardware out there to be had. I've been running and using micro-scale Linux hardware like these new-gen things for decades. Gumstix, BananaBoard, et al.
Okay, the <$50 pricing is pretty nice, but not entirely unexpected given the trend over the last 10 years of having these things get cookie-cut around. The whole point of ARM in the first place was to get to this position ..
The Mele A1000 http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/hacking_the_mele_a1000... is $70, a mere $20 more: it's 2x the board real-estate, another $4 in connectors, it has a case, and it's been around for ~1 year now.
What's interesting is how lagged the development world is from the consumer electronics world. If you want an Allwinner A10, or a Marvell Kirkwood/ ARMADA 300 piece of kit, and you want it at the best possible price, possibly before dev kits show up, you need to scope out consumer electronics, not dev boards. The Mele was a product, this lack's the consumer experience of a product, is just a platform, and it, like many dev kits, show lag v.s. what the consumer boys are up to.
This is simply a small board exposing a very cheap ARM A8 SoC that does everything (just add ram+flash): hold on to your fucking pants and get used to the future. Course, may not materialize. My OpenPandora hasn't. ;)