Before any of you go and get your hopes up, this is no Transformer Prime, far from it, in fact. VIA are bringing this PC to the market with the hopes of replacing Windows desktops for web browsing and light productivity. There’s been a fair few companies bringing super small PCs to the market, such as the better-known Raspberry Pi and the soon-to-be released Beaglebone. There’s no denying the fact that these little boxes are certainly interesting, especially at these kind of price points. It’s said to land in July under the guise of the APC.
The PC VIA are bringing to market will feature a WonderMedia ARM processor-based ARM11 design – no word on clock speed just yet – 2GB of internal storage, 512MB DDR3 RAM, four USB ports and unspecified video accelerators to handle HD video. The PC will fit into any mini-ITX based case and comes with four USB ports to handle keyboards, mice and more storage. It also only draws a maximum of 13.5-watts which must be nice for mother earth, right?
There’s a number of things I can already see a feature for already, if the PC costs $49, you could re-purpose old keyboards, mice perhaps that 4:3 monitor in the basement and have a great PC for children without having to worry about them breaking anything. I don’t know why but I foresee this becoming perfect for a kitchen PC – if they exist – for recipes and tutorial videos, I use my tablet for this but I really hate getting the screen dirty. Of course, with the ability to play HD video – along with its HDMI port – this can comfortably go behind the box and be controlled by another Android device remotely and replace that noisy PC behind the stand. It’s awesome to see little projects like this gain ground and I hope when it launches it’ll be as good as it sure seems to be.
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