Also, that was one of the lowest-content and worst-thought-out TechCrunch writeups I've seen ("If you’ve ever wanted to plug a Windows machine into your TV for a little hot and heavy Excel slinging, you’re in luck"... really? I've done so with Laptops for the last decade).
And they even acknowledge "These single-stick computers are nothing new " (heck, we've got some Intel Compute Sticks at my work). I guess it's not fun having to write up these things.
That's why Chinese no-brand maker have been making those since the Intel Baytrail was released:
http://www.geekbuying.com/category/Windows-Mini-PCs-1655/
It's nice to see a device from a well-known brand that stays close to the anonymous Chinese manufacturers, but at the end of the day the innovation that makes it possible comes from the chip makers.
I wonder when we can have that level of power and convenience in our regular phones.
Reference: http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/6/8560195/microsoft-continuum...
If you're one of the lucky few with an Ubuntu phone, you can do this as well.
True, but it depends on what you want to do with it. I can run Linux on an Intel Edison board (did some Python and C++ programming on one last weekend), but I wouldn't dare to try to write code on anything heavier than vim.
If someone came out with a stick computer that simply connects to wifi and displays a webpage in a relatively modern browser at 1080 (or at least 720) and makes it easy, I would buy several of them at a nice premium over whatever the hardware normally costs.
I actually think an Android hacker or RaspberryPI hobbyist could make some money selling something like that.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=compulab-...
The CPU on this one is the same as on the Intel Compute Stick, a Z3735F.
I'll update this if I find anything.
Now only if someone were providing hosting for them ...
Maybe Raspberry Hosting[0] would be interested ;)
Keep in mind you can buy a much more powerful machine than this from Amazon or Microsoft for around $10 all in (yes, running Windows). So they'd have to be looking around $5 and IPv4 addresses can cost $1.5-2/each.
But thanks.
"5V, 2A wall-mount AC-DC power adapter"
So I need to have cables trailing around. They don't show that in the pretty pictures do they? :/
The CPU is fast enough for moderate web browsing, using Office, playing videos and music, etc. In other words, the casual tasks of an "average user". Of course, it wasn't made to compile software or run complex simulations, and it has some thermal throttling (my tablet has no fans and this stick doesn't appear to have any, either), so if you use the four cores to the maximum for some time, the speed will start decreasing from 1.56 GHz (I have made the max go as low as 0.96 GHz due to throttling). This is the kind of thing that doesn't show in all benchmarks, so beware. (To be fair, spec sheets also don't say that when cores are not fully used, turboboost kicks in and a single core can be working at 1.8 GHz for quite some time).
The integrated Intel graphics are (as usual) good for media playing, web browsing and dealing with Windows UI animations, but forget any kind of gaming that demands more than a smartphone game.
The biggest problem, for me at least, is the lack of RAM: 2 GB of RAM are filled quite fast with 6-8 Chrome tabs and some background software open. It also doesn't take much to fill the whole 4 GB of commit space, and of course, bringing pages in and out of the pagefile is quite slow (the storage is flash, but not quite a SSD). It is easy to make Windows show a "system running low on memory" message just by opening 20 Chrome tabs, some with heavy sites. If all you want to do is run Microsoft Office, I found it to actually be much lighter on memory use than I previously thought (I never saw OneNote, Excel or Word go beyond 90 MB).
Storage gets quite full very easily, mine is always with ~1 GB free (Windows and Office installed on C:, most other things installed on the SD card), and this is using things like NTFS compression. If this stick is like my tablet, it will have 6 GB of storage "wasted" on a recovery partition. Also, the trick Microsoft recommends OEMs use for fitting Windows on systems with as few as 16 GB of storage, which consists on using WIM images for storing the system files, works only while the install is fresh: as more and more system updates are installed, the altered files seem to be stored out of the image, which means there's effectively more space used with Windows files than with a normal install. I have "reserved" the Windows 10 update and I'm eager to see how it will deal with background-downloading the (possibly gigabytes) of files into a system with only 1 GB free.
I once thought of installing Visual Studio just to see how slow it would run, but gave up once I understood most components must be installed to C: (it appears that installing VS effectively equates to "extending Windows" with developer tools).
I am still quite happy with the purchase (it was about $150) since it allows for doing things Android tablets don't do, like running the full MS Office or using proper desktop versions of browsers and other software. I imagine this stick opens the same kind of possibilities.
Having just a Chromecast sucks because you need a whole other smart device to actually do things. The Roku is a little better, but honestly it's too slow to navigate.
With Windows, I can do whatever the heck I want. We can play classic game emulators with Xbox controllers, watch ripped exercise DVDs with VLC media player (my wife does this), we run Netflix for Windows or Kodi to watch movies/TV and then of course we can do anything that a Chromecast does by simply opening Chrome (with adblock). It's awesome.
Can you look at funny memepics on the web while Pandora is playing in the background on Apple TV? Shop for a new game on Steam while playing a YouTube video? Connect an Xbox 360 controller to play games? We do all of these things. I haven't used an Apple TV, but somehow I doubt that it excels at multi-tasking or interoperating with the non-Apple universe.
