If you are a fan of the Raspberry, you might be interested in a new offering called the Odroid-C1, the ODROID-C1 is a credit card-sized single-board computer, this device is similar and it runs Android KitKat or Ubuntu Linux 14.04 for the operating system, but the ODROID-C1 is much more powerful.
The ODROID-C1 is packing a 1.5GHz quad-core Amlogic SoC (processor). Along with that quad-core processor, it also has 1GB of RAM and a quasi-RPi-compatible 40-pin expansion. It also has a Mali-450 GPU just like the one used on Allwinner SoCs. It has four USB 2.0 ports, a micro-HDMI port, RJ45 Ethernet, a MicroSD slot, micro-USB connector, Infrared (IR) receiver, and an eMMC module socket, which offers storage access two to three times faster than via the SD card.
This is the first Cortex-A5 based Odroid board. Benchmarks ran by the folks behind the Odroid claim it is 6x faster than the Raspberry Pi. Take this claim with a grain of salt since the devs behind Odroid obviously have a vested interest in showing that it is faster.
The Odroid measures 85 x 56mm and for projects where weight matter the Odroid-C1 is a couple grams lighter than the Raspberry Pi Model B+.
With all this packed into a single board, add a few peripherals and you could have yourself a fully functioning super-tiny system. It does have limitations but they are only so far as you’re imagination and creativity as like the Pi you can build off it, or if that’s not you’re thing $35 for a functioning microcomputer could make a pretty cheap media streaming platform with something like Plex installed.
The ODROID-C1 quad-core single-board computer is now available, and it’s only $35.