Chinese device makers have been putting out tiny devices that you can plug into a TV to run Android apps for over a year. And while I have a habit of referring to them as slightly larger than a USB flash drive, they’re actually pretty chunky by modern flash drive standards.
But SmartCandy’s new Android TV stick really does look more like a USB flash drive than a tiny Android computer. It measures just 2.67″ x 1.14″ x 0.47″ and weighs about an ounce.
ARMDevices caught up with SmartCandy at a recent trade show and got a look at the tiny TV stick.
Under the hood it has a 1.6 GHz Rockchip ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. It has a microSD card slot.
There’s a catch though — there’s no room for a WiFi or USB port in the case, so the company offers an external adapter with WiFi and USB. There’s also an optional dock with Ethernet and 3USB ports.
The company’s website also mentions a model with a Telechips processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage.
Anybody know where these can be purchased?
Most android mini pc is small enough, this one is too small. Dont like it, if you can want use wireless keybaord, you still need to connect the usb converter…..
Very interesting!
I can see some interesting hacking potential in this!
I’m not sure I get the form factor on these. They are putting half the components (USB, WiFi, Ethernet) into a separate seconadary box which attaches to the main dongle via micro USB. Yeah sure, that makes the main dongle super small, but for any functionality, you need the secondary box attached, so not sure I get the point.
The dongle may be behind the TV, so it can be awesome to have the 3 USB ports and the Ethernet port on the cable, away from the HDMI port behind the TV, to more easily access those ports when you change to connect different USB hard drive, USB storage, change the USB RF adapter to change wireless mouse, keyboard, etc. On the cable is cool (as long as they don’t actually remove performance somehow), the only problem is this cable is not a standard.
Cool beans! Yeah, part of my new found obsession with stick computers is that some of them are (sort of) approaching the size of the cable itself and that is a big indicator that we are close to ubiquitous computing… Thanks for posting all the great articles!
Yes, very good point.
This is really cool. But to me, most of the existing sticks are small enough that the cables are already bulkier than the computers themselves. Yay for more form factor options, though.
Honestly i wish that there was some way to turn these sticks into pocket sized tablets.
Have you ever taken apart a pocket computer? Some of the boards _are_ that small… battery etc etc etc
quite aware of it. What i would love to see was a device that had a hdmi input and some way to access a touch screen (USB perhaps) so that these plugs could be inserted, without stripping them down to the board or messing with solder, and be used in a portable capacity.
a lapdock almost fits the bill, it would turn the stick into an android notebook, without a touch screen.
So far I have yet to find a USB CAPACITIVE touchscreen in the pricerange and size range needed.
Once I do, I will look into converting a $50 atrix lapdock into an android convertable notebook/tablet
There are other small ones with the Telechips ARM Cortex-A5 but this is the smallest I’ve yet seen with the Rockchip RK3066 ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core. I guess that it’s just the wifi antennae that is external using the cable which may be an advantage if the wifi signal strength is thus perhaps enhanced. The down-side is if you loose the special cable, you can’t use it anymore while “standard size” HDMI sticks work with any standard MicroUSB (though some require minimum 1A from charger I think).