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Gooseberry Launches Android-based Raspberry Pi Rival
New submitter masternerdguy writes with this snippet from Tom's Hardware about yet another tiny, Linux-capable single-board computer: "The manufacturer claims that the Gooseberry is 'roughly 3 x more powerful in processing power,' and twice the RAM (512 MB) [compared to] 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 is 'expected in the future.'"
Unlike the Pi, this board has an actual modern CPU (an ARMv7 Cortex-A8 at 1GHz), a more open SoC (Allwinner A10, which is a chinese ARM SoC and isn't bound by the aura of Broadcom NDAs, and also has a sane boot process unlike the Broadcom chip in the Pi that needs a GPU binblob to even boot), and its GPU (ARM Mali400), while closed (as all mobile GPUs are currently), is actively being reverse engineered and an open source driver is expected in the near future. It certainly is not perfect, but it seems a lot more palatable than the slow, outdated, and Broadcom-proprietary-to-hell-and-back Pi.
Finally, an affordable ARM SBC that doesn't actually suck. This one I'll buy.
While we're on the subject here's an overview of other tiny Linux PCs, including handhelds like the Pandora and the Ben Nanote. The list of course excludes what potentially could be the most widely deployd tiny Linux PCs, cellphones and 7-inch tablets running Android.