As I was wandering past Marvell’s exhibit at CES this weekend, I spotted an incredibly tiny PC called the EBOX connected to a big screen LCD. The display showed that the computer was running Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and that it could handle 1080p HD video playback.
When I asked if there was a spec sheet, I was told it’s on the web, but I can’t seem to find any information about this prototype online. So here’s all I know about the EBOX at this point: It’s tiny, impossibly light (I’d say under a pound), and the OS is running off of an SD card. There’s no hard drive.
The PC uses a Marvell Armada 510 processor, which is the same chipset that’s powering the smartbook I mentioned earlier this week. The Armada 500 series processors are ARM v7-based chips that can run up to 1.2GHz.
I don’t think the EBOX is actually a finished product that’s ready to come to market yet. Rather, it’s a prototype developed by Quanta. But it’s one of the tiniest computers I’ve ever seen. I seriously thought at first that it was a media player, not a full-fledged computer.
More pictures after the break.
“I seriously thought at first that it was a media player, not a full-fledged computer.”
What’s the difference? Almost all media players are just full fledged computers with a custom linux distro. It’s all the same these days.
It reminds me of the Timex Sinclair 1000 but without the keyboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/Zx81-timex.jpg/280px-Zx81-timex.jpg
Perhaps the ST1000 was ahead of its time.
“Perhaps the ST1000 was ahead of its time.”
Sinclair had a few little gems fitting that description 🙂
Wow! I want one. I was just trying out Boxee on Ubuntu on my old Toshiba laptop last night, I reckon the EBOX would work wonderfully as a tiny media PC running Boxee or MythTV. Better than a media player like WDTV Live or Asus O!Play.
The shape of things to come?
Adding to telephones small enough to lose,
now computers small enough to lose.
Not yet as small as my wristwatch pda, but…