Gooseberry Android board (Raspberry PI alternative)

I’ve set up Gooseberry for one chief reason, the time the Raspberry Pi is taking to get here! I’m one of the many who wasn’t up at some unearthly hour pressing the F5 key and so subsequently, will not receive their raspberry pi at a reasonable date. This caused me to look for alternatives to the Raspberry Pi leading me to what is known as the Allwinner A10 chip. As you may have heard from Rhombus Tech, this is an Arm Soc which has great promise with the best price to performance ratio. Excited by the figures Rhombus Tech proposed, I realised that yet again, it would be a long time before I got my hands on their development board. Currently, they don’t even have a prototype! Disappointed by the lack of options and the inevitable wait, I noticed that tablets were currently selling with the Allwinner A10 chip. I didn’t want a tablet however, I wanted a board like the Raspberry Pi!

At this point I had an idea, what if I could purchase just the board itself and use it just like the Pi. I contacted the board’s manufactures and am happy to announce, that I will be making Allwinner A10 boards available here in the UK tiding people over until the Pi is out or simply to serve as a more powerful alternative to the Raspberry pi. These boards are roughly 3x the power of the Pi and I will be selling them with a charger for £40. This is a highly competitive price that has taken a great deal of time to negotiate. They are actually a much better deal than the raspberry pi, as they offer inbuilt wifi, more ram and feature a newer Arm Soc which is compatible with Ubuntu. You may be asking why not just buy a tablet on ebay and of course I encourage you to do so, but what I’m offering here is a cheaper price and convenience. I hope that in the coming months, a community will form round this board leading to development of software and other projects, mainly the porting of XMBC to the allwinner .

For those of you who have made it to the site, please provide some comments on wether you think the above is a good idea. If nothing else the site can serve as a rant about the Raspberry Pi not coming quick enough!

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The Gooseberry is as a $63 Android board powered by an Allwinner A10 ARM Cortex-A8 (1.5 GHz) processor. 



The bare-bones board also features Mali 400 graphics, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, a microSD card slot, mini HDMI/USB ports and a headphone jack.

Although Gooseberry arrives pre-loaded with Android 2.3, the device is capable of running a number of other operating systems, including Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), Ubuntu and Puppy Linux.



As Brad Linder of Liliputing notes, since the Gooseberry is equipped with an Allwinner A10 chip, anything that runs on the Mele A1000 or MK802 should run on these tiny computer system.



"But unlike the MK802 or Mele A1000, the Gooseberry is targeted at devs and tinkerers. Like the popular Raspberry Pi, this little computer doesn't even have a protective case. It's just an exposed system board," Linder explained.



"While the Gooseberry sells for nearly twice the cost of a Raspberry Pi device, it also has a faster processor based on newer architecture. The Allwinner A10 can run at speeds up to 1.5 GHz, [while] the Gooseberry also has built-in WiFi — something that you don't get with the Pi."

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