In terms of hardware, MiiPC looks and feels very much like a finished product. We saw two versions of the system, one made of white plastic, the other clad in brushed aluminum. Both machines use black plastic for the top and bottom surfaces and for the area surrounding the ports. The white unit was closest to production, with a proper power button and green LED lighting in the base. Build quality was on par with other similar devices in the same price range (Roku boxes and Apple TVs) -- no complaints here. This prototype features Marvell's current Armada chip (shared with most Google TVs) instead of the next generation processor. It's air cooled with generously-sized heat sink.

Things are more rocky on the software front -- it's clearly a work in progress, at least when it comes to the user experience. We're not talking about the core multi-user functionality or the companion app here (more on that later), just the basic desktop environment. During our demo, the prototype MiiPC was running Ice Cream Sandwich. While the company's custom WebKit browser loaded the full version of Engadget without issues and played our Flash videos just fine, it was less responsive than surfing the web on an older Chromebook, and that was just with one tab open. There's still much to be sorted-out, from basics like right-clicking to more complicated stuff like support for Android apps that run only in portrait mode.

We were pretty impressed with the iOS companion app which was significantly more polished than the MiiPC's software. Chief Product Officer Richard Sah gave us a compelling walkthrough of the app's various features and showed us how to control and monitor a user's access to apps. It's possible for parents to close apps remotely, log their kids out and even prevent future logins, all by tapping a few buttons. From our time spent with the MiiPC, it's obvious that there's still a lot of work left, but judging from the quality of the hardware and companion app, we have little doubt that ZeroDesktop can deliver a solid product when it finally ships this Android PC to its backers.