(2012-03-29, 23:36) bornagainpengui Wrote: (2012-03-29, 23:27) j1nx Wrote: (2012-03-29, 21:58) bornagainpengui Wrote: This looks great, too bad it runs Android. :-(



--bornagainpenguin

You clearly did not read the information provided.

I did. Clearly my bitterness at a lack of Android port for XBMC has colored my sarcasm all wrong. I look forward to seeing Ubuntu (Linaro) for this, and hope to see more ARM powered hardware released with source code, maybe eventually finally even seeing a Smartbook some day....

I know how you feel about an android port, but we have to fair to ourselfs. Android is a very strange thing, yes it uses a linux kernel, but the whole "OS" is more like one big program acting as a Virtual Machine (Dalvik). It will maybe be very difficult and maybe impossible in the end to port all libraries to this machine. To me Android look more like something as VMWare ESXi. A bare kernel booting a VM where your software runs. Accessing you hardware from within those VM's is hard. I am no Android expert, so I might not be right at everything, but the essence sound about rightBut you never know. The devs are working on it in the background, so you never know where they might come up with in the (near) future.To come back to this device. It is really great news one of those chinees factories finally acknowledge the is something as GPL. Having the full kernel/driver sources for this device making it nothing less than the pandabours / beagleboard. Only the price is a lot less.The U-Boot on the Allwinner devices basically always boot from sd-card prior to NAND, so if you put your kernel and rootfs on a sd-card, slide it in, it will boot. You don't even touch the official stuff, breaking any warranties. This Mele 1000 box is very nicely priced, but whatever comes out of this whole process, can also be used at almost all of those Allwinner A10 tablets out there. Believe that are a lot of different tablets. You don't talk about XBMC on android anymore, but a full supported "dual" boot option, directly booting into XBMC.I have great expectations about the Allwinner devices.