The Mi Mini PC is supposed to be a pocket-sized computer with a touchscreen display, support for dual booting Windows and Android, and surprisingly powerful hardware for a device with a list price of $299 that went up for pre-order on Indiegogo for half that price earlier this year.
In May I expressed skepticism that the developers would be able to deliver on all of their promises. And while I’m still not going to say with absolute certainty that the Mi Mini PC is a scam, it’s pretty clear now that if the device does ship it won’t be exactly what some users had been hoping for.
An update posted to the crowdfunding campaign explains that a few design changes have been made… and that the earliest the Mi Mini PC could ship at this point would be November.
Originally the plan had been to ship the computer in September. Now mass production is said to begin in October, with shipments starting in mid-November (assuming nothing else goes wrong).
So about those changes: the original plan for the Mi Mini PC had been to build a tiny computer with a a 5 inch display, an Intel Atom x7-Z8750 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. But the developers switched to a more powerful Core M3-7Y30 processor and 16GB of RAM.
Many months later, a project update explains that the new hardware generates more heat, which necessitated a new cooling system. So the Mi Mini PC will now have a larger body, a 6 inch screen instead of 5, and a fan for active cooling instead of a fanless design with passive cooling.
It would have been nice if the developers had considered the heat issue before promising the hardware upgrade earlier this year, and it’s not entirely clear why it’s taken four months to figure out that the system needs a new cooling system.
Some folks are convinced the answer is that the Mi Mini PC is a scam. A more generous explanation might be that the creators of the project were a little in over their heads, and are now trying to figure out how to build the product they had promised. This is often a risk with crowdfunded gadgets.
I’m still somewhat somewhat skeptical that it’s possible to offer a mini PC with these specs for so little money… even if the $149 starting price was just a promotional price for backers of a crowdfunding campaign. But the project has raised over $1.5 million from backers, so there are a lot of people hoping that the project does come to fruition.
It just looks like they may have to wait until November to find out.
I guarantee the product is fake. The $149 price COULD NOT cover even the bill of materials, nevermind a manufactured product. And now they’re switching to a CPU worth double the cost of the Atom? Hah!
This announcement is just buying them some time while they figure out how to get all their money out of China into a Caribbean bank account.
Just sticking the “Mi” part infront of the name gives me bad vibes, like they want me to belive it!s part of the Xiaomi ecosystem.
Can’t agree more. Even I thought it was developed by Xiaomi when I first read about it. Glad I’m not the only one
I don’t see a good use case for this, while being small it is kind of useless by itself.
Having to bring around a whole set of accessories for input does not make it portable.
And if you’re going to use android with just touchscreen that design is probably not going to be nice to hold for long periods.
Other than it being cheap it is probably quite troublesome to use cause it tries to do so much but don’t really excel in anything.
If it were actually a real product, it would be a great inexpensive option for musicians to run live backing tracks and serve as an IEM interface. That’s what I would use it for. It’s certainly a niche product but it would have it uses.
But… I’m pretty sure the entire campaign is a complete fraud.
Higole Gole1 / F1 (avoid the 1plus, which is larger) is what this thing is based on whether or not it’s real. I was actually thinking of getting one of those as a tethered “remote” for photography…