[bornagainpenguin]

I know how you feel about an android port, but we have to fair to ourselfs. Android is a very strange thing, yes it uses a linux kernel, but the whole "OS" is more like one big program acting as a Virtual Machine (Dalvik). It will maybe be very difficult and maybe impossible in the end to port all libraries to this machine. To me Android look more like something as VMWare ESXi. A bare kernel booting a VM where your software runs. Accessing you hardware from within those VM's is hard. I am no Android expert, so I might not be right at everything, but the essence sound about right

But you never know. The devs are working on it in the background, so you never know where they might come up with in the (near) future.

Oh I know, it just burns my butt that the iOS infrastructure (as closed as it is) still manages to be more open than the supposedly open Android infrastructure. It just flies in the face of expectations I had when I chose Android over iOS. And I get that the developers are doing what they can, and that they just had a major release to push out the door...I do get it. And I recognize that many of the libraries they need to get XBMC on iOS were already compiled and ready because of other projects, which aren't yet possible\available on Android, so that really shortened the lead time to getting a working build.

It just bugs me that an open source project surfaced on a closed platform so quickly, and here we are later--lots of time gone by and still nothing on the "open" operating system.

To come back to this device. It is really great news one of those chinees factories finally acknowledge the is something as GPL. Having the full kernel/driver sources for this device making it nothing less than the pandabours / beagleboard. Only the price is a lot less.

Yeah that is a shocker. Maybe someone finally got it through their heads a rising tide floats all boats? Or failing that maybe they finally got the message GPL compliance equals product feature which adds value? Whatever the cause I hope it catches on and people try to drown those companies that comply with the GPL in dollars, euros and rmb...

The U-Boot on the Allwinner devices basically always boot from sd-card prior to NAND, so if you put your kernel and rootfs on a sd-card, slide it in, it will boot. You don't even touch the official stuff, breaking any warranties. This Mele 1000 box is very nicely priced, but whatever comes out of this whole process, can also be used at almost all of those Allwinner A10 tablets out there. Believe that are a lot of different tablets. You don't talk about XBMC on android anymore, but a full supported "dual" boot option, directly booting into XBMC.

That right there has me tempted to go out and buy one of these on speculation towards full time usefulness as an XBMC box...

I have great expectations about the Allwinner devices.

Yeah, I've been following these in the tablet market for a couple of months now, I'm hoping to see more PCs or even smartbooks of these type in the future...

--bornagainpenguin

PS: Sorry for my earlier grumpiness!