Read more.It will be available from Lenovo direct, Dixons and Amazon for £129.99 from July.
Read more.It will be available from Lenovo direct, Dixons and Amazon for £129.99 from July.
A with the others I have got a tablet with the same specs which runs windows and andriod for £83.
I can hide it behind the TV and plug it in via hdmi if wanted but then can unplug and use with its own screen if needed.
Will be interesting to see the price of the cheaper no name versions as I am looking at replacing my media centre/360 extenders with kodi/compute sticks.
another concern with these devices is the usb end getting bent or broken and that's the whole thing pretty much useless. it would be better with a female end and you attach a cable or male connector. IF I got one I would use an extension cable, but I don't need one and I have a similar spec 7" linx tablet with hdmi that does everything pretty much just as good, but has a screen to use portably and was £60 and you can still get them around that price or less
I suppose like most other things in the tech world, the price will drop and these might end up being around the £25 mark and you can use them without worrying about the cost of replacing them
Thinking outside the box, the tablets are cheap as they use 8.1 with bing which I understand is cheap/free. Can these sticks get a bing licence as they aren't below a certain screen size (is it 11"?) as they have no screen so could be used on massive screens.
I'm pretty careful with my stuff, but I bent a usb dongle for a mouse when I forgot it was still plugged in when moving a pc, and an hdmi cable at the back of my pc broke in the way I described, presumably due to the pc being moved during upgrades. I've had a flashdrive fall apart and break after being removed, and a usb tiny card reader break on first use. but out of all the gadgets I've used over the years and the use I make out of them that's nothing much. but for something like that to happen on an expensive device is more concerning, and not everyone looks after stuff that well. it could even be kids or pets that touch and move and break things. hdmi sockets may not always be in a nice place on the back of the screen, they could be on the side or even front of an hdmi amp
Folks pouring scorn on these because a cheapo (usually Linx) tablet is same spec but cheaper, but I thought the whole point of these compute sticks were that they're a plug and play setup. Whereas wouldn't you have to find power for the tablet, plus it's going to look a bit "meh" at the back of the TV?
As the article says, I'm not much impressed with this compute stick, the Asus one is more appealing - especially as the latter supports more than Windows. I'll have to do some research though - if you had a Asus stick running Linux would you be able to operate headless? If so then I'm thinking that this'd be a brilliant way to add some "smarts" to a router - e.g. add get_iplayer downloading by just plugging in a Debian/BSD running stick into the storage port of the typical modern router.
as far as i've read, these sticks need power too, and that comes via USB, so you need to plug in via HDMI and you need another cable to plug into a USB socket either on the tv or a seperate power supply
the tablets however have batteries built in so can work with nothing other than the hdmi cable, but usually also power off usb too. so they are as much plug and play as the stick, if not perhaps moreso. plus as well as plug and play you can play without having to plug it into anything, so travel between home and work and need to see/do something and you can do it on the bus/car/tube/train or standing in the street
depending on your system and where you put it at the back of the tv, in both cases you might not see it. i have a full tower (not mid) case hidden behind my tv, plus a bunch of games consoles and other stuff, so hiding a tablet thats about 8 inches across and half an inch deep isn't going to be hard, especially if it's lying flat
I can see a obvious use for this - when you mount your TV to the wall, it is hard to hide anything like a tablet behind it. So to make a TV smarter by adding a small form PC easily, this idea would be fine.
But I would prefer to see these mature a bit first - like wait for the Asus model, as this would bring the price down and hopefully improve functionality.
if you mount your tv to a wall, you will have cables to supply power and video of some sort. if you have a bunch of things like sky and games consoles it would usually mean either a load of cables running to the tv or devices plugged into an hdmi amp or switch, and one hdmi cable to the tv
either way, you can use a table or even full computer tower connected to a wall mounted tv and hide things neatly, perhaps more neatly
if the tv is attached to the wall and the sockets are at the back, you may not have much space to connect one of these, or if the sockets are at the side it may stick out noticeably, unlike cables. of course you could use an extender cable with one of these. if you tv doesn't supply a power source by usb you would need another power cable to this though
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