Cotton Candy: thumb sized Linux computer
Cotton Candy is a mini Linux box in a package resembling a USB thumb drive. FXI Technologies, Inc., a Norway-based hardware and software startup which developed the product, has launched cstick.com, a community website and technical forum where Cotton Candy development units are immediately available for pre-order. (Unit shown in above video is an engineering sample.)
Specifications include an ARM Cortex-A9 (1GHz) CPU from Samsung, an ARM Mali-400 MP (Quad-core, 1.2GHz) GPU, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, HDMI output and the Android operating system. It decodes MPEG-4, H.264 and other video formats and display HD graphics on any HDMI equipped screen. Operating systems supported to date include Android Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich as well as Ubuntu. On-screen content can be controlled a wide variety of ways – wirelessly using smartphones with an app, Bluetooth peripherals like mice and RF remote controls; or by leveraging a notebook’s integrated keyboard and touchpad.
At $199 this seems a bit overpriced. We’ll keep watching for further information on their manuals and docs page.
The Hoz via the contact form.
This entry was posted in ARM, dev boards, Linux, USB and tagged Cotton Candy.
Comments
$199, Sheeesh. Raspberry Pi is $25-$35. Waayyy overpriced. Or am I missing something?
Even a BeagleBoard is near 100$, you can say that Raspberry Pi is way under-priced and that little usb stick is a quad core ARM running at 1.2Ghz not a single core 600Mhz, if you think in processing power in a very simple way just do 25$ per core x 4 = 100$, add some more for the extra speed and for the extra ram that it must have, and the 200$ dont seem that wrong, yes its expensive, but you can get the best of both worlds with something like a PandaBoard that is dual core for 150$.
Raspberry Pi sell started today, BTW.
…or at least, they *intended* to start selling the Raspberry Pi today. Looks like both of their distributors (Farnell and RS Components) have some website problems right now. The latter, reached by phone, claimed they sell only to business accounts (per #raspberry_pi twitters). Although the RPi folks indicate that should not be the case.
Farnell in Portugal only sells to business accounts, RS should sell to privates, but this is what shows on the RS site about the Raspberry:
http://i.imgur.com/PQkRB.png
When I read this post, I got extremly exited. Basically a R-Pi, with a case etc (actual usable) and a more OSS friendly mali-400 gpu. But 200 USD is way to overpriced. They could have dropped some performance to reach a 99 USD pricepoint, though ~50 sounds more reasonable.
This has bluetooth, WiFi etc and comes with a consumer grade case. Raspberry Pi is a naked board and no RF comms. But bang for buck the Pi is unbeatable. I waited for the 0600Z announcement, managed to access my Farnell account at about 0601Z. Found that I had put a lot of crap in my basket last week while weighing up the pros and cons of some signal cableing. Took about 10 minutes to remove it all from my cart, and finally pushed in an order at 0613Z. I just received an email from Farnell that my Pi will arrive in April… so all 10,000 stock was sold in < 13 minutes!! Pi is going to be a big challenger to the Arduino I think.