The Orange Pi One Plus single-board computer with native support for Android 7.0 Nougat has been released with a new chipset in tow and the product is now available through online retail channels like AliExpress for the price of $19.99. Although the board currently supports only Android Nougat, Linux images for distros including Ubuntu and Debian are reportedly under testing and support will be added at a later date.
The Orange Pi One Plus is powered by a new AllWinner H6 64-bit chipset featuring four ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores and a Mali-T720 MP2 (dual-core) graphics chip offering support for OpenGL ES3.1 and lower, Microsoft DirectX 11 FL9_3, and support for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC). The package promises over 70 GFLOPS of floating point operations according to the manufacturer, however it’s worth noting that future Linux-based distros will supposedly be based on legacy Linux 3.10 kernel, and because this will be the first time for the AllWinner H6 chipset to be featured on a Linux single-board computer, certain features including 3D graphics acceleration may not be supported outside of Android OS, initially.
Moving on to other hardware characteristics, the Orange Pi One Plus houses 1GB of LPDDR3 RAM which is shared with the graphics processor and features a microSD card slot for up to 32GB of storage. It provides an HDMI 2.0a output for 4K video at 60Hz with HDR, HDCP 2.2, and CEC support, while networking is handled by an RTL8211 chip and a 1000M Ethernet RJ45 connector. The single-board computer is equipped with one full-sized USB 2.0 and a microUSB 2.0 connector, a 26-pin header for connecting low-level peripherals, a 3-pin serial console header for debugging, and also features a power and status LED. Overall, the Orange Pi One Plus measures 68 x 48 mm while weighing only 45 grams, and it seemingly offers a cheaper alternative to the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B launched in February of 2016, though as yet it’s unclear whether the Orange Pi unit supports on-board Wi-Fi or any type of Bluetooth connectivity. Readers who may be interested in acquiring this new Android-based single-board computer can refer to the source link below where the product is available for $19.99 excluding taxes. As yet the device is listed next to an expected delivery date (including in the US via ePacket) of anywhere between 12 to 20 days.