Since Rikomagic MK802 and Zero
Device Z802 mini PCs have gone viral and started the Android mini PC
craze, this type of device has been popping a bit everywhere… The latest
interesting device I found is Oval Elephant Mini PC based on AllWinner
A10 processor with 1 GB RAM and selling for 71.49 USD. They have appears
to have a whooping 11 in stocks now to be shipped on the 3rd of July,
but they are also taking pre-orders and if there is enough demand (over
1,000 pieces), the price would go down to 68 USD.
Oval Elephant mini PC Prototype
The
device pictured above is just a prototype, and they have decided to
replace the HDMI mini male output by a proper HDMI output (probably
male). As I said before I prefer this form factor, especially since you
can just connect mini BlueTooth dongles (no sure that one works with Android / Linux though) to add BT connectivity and use your BT wireless keyboard and mouse.
Here are the specs of the device:
| SoC | Allwinner A10/ 1GHz Cortex-A8 with Mali-400 |
| RAM | 1GB DDR3 |
| Storage | 4GB NAND Flash |
| Micro TF card,max 64GB | |
| Connectivity | Wireless 802.11b/g/n |
| USB | Micro 5pin USB / USB2.0 OTG |
| Audio | AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, QCP, MP3, WMA, WAV, MIDI, M4A |
| Video | WMV/ASF/MP4/3GP/3G2M4V/AVI/MJPEG/RV10/DivX/VC-1/MPEG-2/MPEG-4/H.263/H.264 |
| HDMI | Full HDMI port (not mini) 1080P&2160P |
| HDMI ESD | 3xRailClamp0502B |
| Power Chip | AXP209 |
Some of the specs on the Oval Elephant are blatantly wrong (e.g. Adreno GPU – AMD Z430), so I modified it on the list above. The specs have now been updated.
You would not normally mention things like HDMI ESD and power chips in a product spec, but they did that because MK802 designers took some shortcuts that
can potentially fry the device… and Oval Elephant chose to use a more
reliable design. It has also been reported that they will include UART
pins on the board so that hackers can “play” with low level software.
By default the device will come pre-loaded with Android 4.0, but they also plan to release XBMC and Ubuntu
Linaro images. Using Linaro image for end-user devices is probably not
something you would not normally do, as it may not be as stable as the
proper Ubuntu release, but those are the best distributions for ARM
development as you get the bleeding edge features with monthly releases
of the image.
The package includes the HDMI stick, a wireless mouse and a mini USB cable to power the device.
The price does not include shipping, so in the case of the US you’ll have to add about
$11 (now reduced to $7.95). Currently it seems it will only ship to select countries. For example, shipping to Thailand is not available.The site has been updated and they can now send to Canada for $14.95 and Worldwide for $19.99.
Go over Oval Elephant page
to learn more about their device. Bear in mind that this is a new site
(Dec 2011) and a least part of the checkout is not encrypted via SSL. To
be fair, I could just go to the address and contact details part, and
I’m now waiting for my account to be activated. So I did not go as far
as the payment info page.
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