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Several sites have articles about the PocketCHIP, a handheld computer that was funded through Kickstarter. It seems to have shipped to its sponsors, or at least to review sites, but the company's Web site displays "Estimated Shipping October 2016" for the rest of us.
The device is built around the CHIP computer, which has a 1 GHz ARM Cortex-R8 processor, Mali 400 GPU, 4 GB of flash, 512 MB of RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4, and USB 3.0. The PocketCHIP adds a plastic case, keyboard, lithium polymer battery and 480-by-272-pixel touch screen. It comes with Debian Linux and the PICO-8 software suite, which allows one to create and play video games.
The PocketCHIP is being sold for $69 ($49 for those who sponsored it), and the CHIP for $9.
Accessories are also offered to add VGA or HDMI output to the CHIP. It appears that owners of the PocketCHIP would have to take it apart to use those.
Articles:
Further information:
manufacturer's blog
(Score: 2) by dingus on Thursday September 01 2016, @06:00AM
Because your chip is a very fancy nonfunctional credit card without software?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01 2016, @06:16AM
I'm not going to pay more for software than I pay for hardware. The bar just got lowered.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday September 01 2016, @02:32PM
Even free software costs the price of the medium it's on. Maybe you can get a USB stick for less than none dollars and copy a friend's Linux?
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Friday September 02 2016, @02:41AM
(Obvious troll is obvious. But anyway...)
Well, then you may not get to use the software you want because of a silly rule. I have routine had many tens of thousands of dollars of software licensed on nodes when running render farms with nodes that cost a few thousand dollars. Sometimes that's the most cost effective way to do things. But in any case, even free software often still means well paid developers. If a company has a choice between A) Buy some commercial software for X that doesn't quite meet every desire but hope that the vendor will add their feature requests eventually. B) Build something in-house that does what they want for 10X. Or, C) Start with some existing open source software and hire a few of the developers or retask some of their internal developers to add new features for perhaps 0.5X - 5X, firing all the coders seems like a terrible strategy,m quite independent of whatever the hardware costs, or whether you can get the software for free.