Kaser Net'sPC2 YF810-8G Review: $100 For An Android Nettop?

[acku]

What’s the cheapest computer you can buy today? And we're not talking Raspberry Pi. We still need enough horsepower to email, browse the Web, or play a movie. Kaser claims to have the answer with its $100 Android-based nettop. But is it up to the task?

Kaser Net'sPC2 YF810-8G Review: $100 For An Android Nettop? : Read more

 

[Matsushima]

Seriously? Another slow ARM processor with a bloated phone OS on a desktop. Tragic.

 

[Matsushima]

I have something like that, a bloated Android HTPC that looks a bit like Raspberry Pi.

 

[dingo07]

How about adding it to the NAV system in a 2006 Acura TL that has a 7" touchscreen?

 

[Firion87]

Now AMD's APU is incredibly cheap, add 1g of ram a hdd lying around your home and your way better off with a x86 than this underpowered NO FLASH compatible no nothing system. Why are they even talking about such systems? I'm an Intel fanboy but got a AMD e350 system for my parents. I am amazed how well that little thing works for pretty much anything you encounter in daily use for little money (hdd 120g second hand, case and psu can be purchased for as little as 35$, mb+ram 65$ brand new)

 

[ET3D]

Wow, this is really overpriced or underspecced or both. The Allwinner A10 is simply a crappy chip. Single core Cortex A8, 16-bit RAM interface, 512MB limitation, that's pretty crap. I bought a Chinese tablet (Onda V712) for $125 with a quad core A7, 2GB of RAM and an 1280x800 IPS screen, so if you drop the screen I imagine this could all be put into $100, and provide much better performance. (It's about as powerful as the Nexus 7, a little slower on the CPU side and faster on the GPU side.)
As for Android, it should also be possible to make it more usable. A better specced device would have 1080p native, and allowing to change DPI settings on the fly is likely to do wonders to usability on a bit screen (i.e., scale the UI instead of blowing it up).
Android also has some limited windows. It's a hack, but there are apps which support it, such as Tiny Apps, which provides a notes app, calculator, paint, music player and music recorder all running in their own small windows. There are also floating video players ("floating" is the Android app way of saying "windowed") and floating web browsers.
I think that an Android PC could be made usable (though not great). This one isn't it, and I feel that testing was too limited, but I won't fault you for it because any A10 device is not really worth a second look.

 

[ET3D]

I checked out some Chinese stores, and indeed it's possible to buy something specced link my tablet (Allwinner A31, 2GB RAM, ...) for $90, and some dual core A9 1GB devices in the $80-$100 range. These should be much better than this particular piece of crap.

 

[Aljhon Pobar]

"armed with a single Cortex-A8 core running at 1.0 GHz. For a little perspective, that's about half of the processing power wielded by the original iPad. "
How come? 1st Gen iPad is powered by Apple A4 SoC which uses a 1GHz Cortex A8. And this Allwiner A10 is powered by the same Cortex A8.
This is very disappointing for a well known techsite.

 

[obarthelemy]

how did you manage to select such a crappy representative of Android PCs, when for example the similarly priced Minix Neo X5 is several times more powerful and has an excellent, frequently updated OS ?

 

[ET3D]

G-Box Midnight MX2 is another good choice you might want to review. Serves as a good XBMC player out of the box, but can be used as an Android mini PC.

 

[joebob2000]

About 6 months ago I picked up a dual CPU/quad GPU android PC stick, for $50 shipped. It lacks hardware ethernet or the plethora of USB ports, but it is pretty darn fast for how cheap it is. I suspect Kaser was the first of the "android pc" vendors to submit something to Tom's but is it too hard to hit up Aliexpress for comparable priced units?

 

[__Miguel_]

Hmm... Something seems to have horribly wrong with this review...
Seriously, what happened? Did you forget the "grandma's PC" also needed a monitor to be factored into the price? Did you forget to run power consumption benchmarks? Or that you can't really judge a sub-HD touchscreen (from the Android 2.3 phone) performance (including responsiveness) side-by-side? Or even that, quite frankly, the VGA output is the only real thing that pulls the Net'sPC2 apart from the rest of the Android micro PCs? Seriously, there's just too much stuff wrong in this review...
Finally, for your information, be advised that A10 SoCs are now, and have been for quite some time, considered "value" offerings, you can get hold of "HDMI sticks" (MK80x and derived) based on that SoC for well under $40 (which would still be under $100 if you were to add a keyboard and mouse). RK3066-based (1.6GHz Dual-core A9) sticks with 1GB of RAM are about $50 now, and Quad-core ones with 2GB of RAM start at around $75. Sure, there's no VGA output on any of those sticks, but was that the only reason to choose the Kaser?
I hope you can take another look at this, since this kind of system seems to be getting semi-popular. The newer quad-core sticks, both A31 and RK3188-based, have vastly superior CPU power and also much better GPUs (Mali 400MP4 and SGX544MP2), it would be nice to see just how much better they are overall.
That being said, it's still nice to see just how much powerful even generations-old x86 hardware can still be when compared to ARM, if you're throwing noise, size, and power consumption out of the window.

 

[xenol]

I've used my ASUS Transformer Infinity as a sort of "replacement" laptop after my last one blew up.
The problem I have with it is that using Android like a PC OS is very lackluster. This is particularly annoying with web pages that I would like to keep, more or less, up and running and go do something else when there's little activity or I want to go check something else out real quick... only to tab back in and find Android took it out of memory because hey, you can always refresh it!
So Android's pretty poor if you need to use real time web apps and a native app isn't available.

 

[ram1009]

Desktop PCs will never disappear. No matter how powerful any portable becomes in the future there will always be heat & space limitations that only a desktop can overcome. Personally, I don't own a portable device (including a smart phone) and I don't seem to be missing anything I'm aware of. Remember, the question to ask is: Can it run Crysis?

 

[Geddoff Myazz]

A better comparison than this would be a Mele, which has a 2 1/2 inch sata dock.

 

[sna]

here is my answer to this stupid box

1- CPU : AMD A4-3300 (or trinity equal) : 40$

2- Motherboard : ASRock FM2A55M-DGS : 50$

3- Ram : 2x1 G DDR 3 1600 : 27$

4- Itx Case in win with 200watt psu : 40$

5- UsB 8G flash stick for system :10$

167$ small box system WAAAAAAY better .... and cheap.

 

[chaospower]

Try checking something decent like this: http://www.geekbuying.com/item/Tronsmart-T428-Quad-Core-Mini-PC-Android-4-2-Rockchip-RK3188-2G-DDR3-Wifi-Bluetooth-TV-BOX-314524.html
Instead of this overpriced garbage pc... Seriously 100$ for an allwinner a10???

 

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

And to put this into perspective, Jaguar has slightly HIGHER IPC than the Athlon 64 and also clocks up to 2GHz with 4 cores.

 

[RedJaron]

Any of the beige boxen in your garage are better suited for that.

Love the Brian Regan shout-out.

 

[adamovera]

@Aljhon Pobar: Corrected. I believe that sentence was originally in reference to the A10 vs A4 graphics, not processor. CPU-wise they should be equivalent.

 

[zodiacfml]

expensive. there's too much competition for this new device.

 

[cats_Paw]

But can ti play Crys.... nevermind .

 

[cats_Paw]

But can ti play Crys.... nevermind .

 

[army_ant7]

I find it weird that it says on the "Diet Web Browsing Grand Prix" graph that the Nexus 7 got 449 while Kaser's device got 448, i.e. a 1 point difference. I find it even weirder that no emphasis was put on this fact.
I guess the fact that the Kaser used the Android browser with some tests might've helped narrow the gap with the Nexus 7, but still...

 

[adamovera]

@army_ant7:
Good catch! For some reason when I sorted the data for this chart, it screwed up the formulas for the middle three systems. I pasted just the values to another sheet then sorted it to re-make the chart. Thanks again!