Hummingboard i1

Received this last week and spent this weekend playing about with it.

It is a 1ghz, 512mb DDR3, 32 bit, 2 USB port credit card computer.

Whilst my model is the entry model, the top model also has a RTC Back up battery for time and date, mSATA and IR receiver making it the perfect XBMC device. Also the top level has 2x1ghz core, 1gb DDR3 and GC2000 3D GPU and 1gb Ethernet.

All devices have gpio pins and I'm yet to find out how compatable the gpio will be with pi add on boards.

While it looked similar to the pi it isn't, I was able to have this up and running in less time to the banana pi but slightly longer to pi. However once pass the stage of burning images to micro sd s it's actually quite fast and worked well as a word processor with libre office on Debian, however it struggled with YouTube of which might be a browser issue.  Android worked but thought I was running a touchscreen set up and XBMC seemed to work flawlessly on the device.

The device did get rather hot so I would suggest a case or some sort of stilt system so air can get all around it.

So the question would I buy one? I certainly would buy this over the banana pi without a doubt as this seems to be better made. I'm yet to try the gpio pins out which would be the selling point on top of the fact it's faster etc to pi however with the pi in a very successful position with tons of support I can only see me using the hummingboard as a XBMC device. I certainly won't ignore this device as I reckon if they can get the software sorted and gpio support up to scratch then this could be an excellent device. I expect if I had the top model I would probably be praising it even more.

So conclusion, it is a great device that is faster than the pi, if a specially written os like raspbian for raspberry was introduced this would certainly be a very fast system but for now I think it's best selling point is xbmc and with that and seeing that the upper level options I give this 4 stars.