Developers over at Norwegian startup company FXI have today announced the release of an Android based operating system that is designed to run on a USB stick that weighs in at a mere 21 grams.
The stick, coined ‘Cotton Candy’ (for it ubiquitously weighs less than a stick of cotton candy) is designed to add Android capabilities to USB and HDMI native devices.
The stick is able to transform devices such as Smartphones, Laptops and tablets in to portable computers, capable of playing multimedia applications and accessing online services. The only requirement is that you plug it in to a display device with either of these two ports.
Plus, as an additional bonus, the device also comes preloaded with Ubuntu!
Speaking directly to the tech heads out there, the Cotton Candy USB stick sports:
- 1GB of RAM
- 1.2GHz ARM(R) Cortex(TM)-A9 CPU
- A quad-core ARM Mali(TM)-400 MP GPU
- WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
- Micro SD port (capable of supporting devices up to 64gb)
Multimedia support on the device allows it to decode and play 1080p H.264 and MPEG-4 video files, as well as support for mp3 and image files (PNG/JPEG/GIF/BMP).
The device is rumoured to be for sale sometime in the second half of 2012 at a cost of around $200.
This is very interesting. With the upcoming of USB 3.0, we may just see some dedicated processors in USB form I believe. Allow things like bitcoin to operate much easier considering that using the GPU for bitcoin mining is only more efficient because the GPU is doing nearly nothing. With a faster processor than the GPU, I believe we will see an increase in this if there happens to be a market for it. After all, everything revolves around money now-a-days..