If we're talking about small computers that are okay to be announced but not 100% ready to ship, I think the Open Pandora (<a href="http://www.open-pandora.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.open-pandora.org/</a>) deserves mention.<p>There are some ... production kinks left to iron out, but I'm sure we'll see them shipping with some kind of predictability in, say, two months time.<p>Currently production is being re-targeted to Germany, with what seems to be awesome results, so far. I'm very impressed by the guys behind this project, if I'm sounding very much tongue-in-cheek that's just because I bought mine in March of 2009, and am still waiting for it to ship. :)
I've never heard of the allwinner A10 before, and it looks great on paper: 1.5ghz Cortex-A8, 1 GB RAM, SATA, 3d graphics and hardware video decoder, and the other usual stuff like SD, HDMI, Ethernet, NAND and various other I/O ports, plus full GPL source code (I was under the impression that ARM don't release the source code for MALI drivers under GPL?).<p>However, it looks like they haven't produced a single unit yet. It's vaporware. They hope to sell an initial batch for something closer to $70, which seems more realistic, but I still think they're overly optimistic.<p>On the other hand, Raspberry Pi is looking good. They've had considerable delays (I think initially they were intending to start selling the boards in November), but they're making good progress and seem to have plenty of traction. Their target price seems more easily reachable considering the lower specs compared to the allwinner A10.
Great Article, but I think it also should mention the Global Scale stuff (D2Plug, DreamPlug, etc.) (<a href="http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/c-2-globalscale-technologies-products.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/c-2-globalscale-techn...</a>) They have an identically layout, are a little bit more expensive but they ship at least!
From the title I'd thought this would be about practical uses of this hardware. They sound really cool but I haven't seen the big "need" that they're fulfilling.
Will the raspberry pi ship with some form of Ubuntu?<p>I hadn't heard this as the specific distribution of choice, but I could be wrong. Would be an interesting choice considering all of the Ubuntu media turbulence.<p>I had heard at one stage that it would run some form of fedora. Will be interesting piece of hardware regardless.