Oval Elephant Android on a Stick

Been wanting to do a carpc on my neon SRT-4 due to my cd player eating up my cds. I came across the mk802 android on a stick which contains a cortex a8 1ghz(can be overclocked to 1.5 max(1.2ghz stable)) either 512mb or 1gb of ddr3 ram, but many users are posting that due to some shortcuts in hardware on the HDMI side it can fry HDMI ports. So I saw a posting of oval elephants android on a stick. Same specs as the mk802 but has a full HDMI(with no shortcuts that will fry a HDMI socket), two mic ports, and a micro sdxc card reader that can read 64gb.

Both of these are USB powered and both can run Android ICS and Linux( with hope of linaro and XBMC).

And the best part is both of these can be had for less than 80$. Could this be a low powered cost effective CarPc alternative for people. What would be the pros and cons of doing a setup with these mentioned hardware and how would I be able to synch an iphone 4 to an android car pc system to send text and answer my phone call(invested alot of money in ios apps that are being used for film making, which is the reason for keeping upgrading to the next gens).

After seeing that same chip in the Android head unit i reviewed last year i wouldn't even bother, especially trying to run ICS. It was barely capable of running Froyo. The amount of RAM looks good, but ultimately that CPU will bottleneck the system.

Actually the Oval Elephant and the MK802 uses the cortex a8 processor which is rated from 800mhz-1.5ghz depending on the manufacture settings. The bybyte uses a Telechips TCC8900 chipset which has a processor range of 500mhz to 800mhz(again depends on manufacturers settings). The allwinner a10 chipset also features the mali 400 multi core GPU which is pretty robust compared to the bybyte tcc8900 gpu which uses the outdated mali200. Also ram plays an important part as the mk802/OE has either 512mb or 1gb of ddr3 ram while the bybyte has 256mb of ram.

And also there are numerous sites posting videos of theses Androids on a stick playing on HDTVs, running ICS pretty smoothly. Benchmarks puts these devices in Panasonic Eluga territory(with the eluga running a TI OMAP-4430 chipset).

Benchmarks of the MK802:
Quadrant clocked in at around 1238, GL Bench 20fps, and Sun Spider 5075.8

I'm just saying that the chips are completely different in the MK802/Oval Elephant mini-pc on a stick compared to the bybyte Car-Droid.

I bought a PandaBoard ES a month back that I've started working on, double the price but much more capable. (including: wifi, bluetooth, 10/100, and dual HDMI) Lemme know if you wanna join my efforts. Currently I'm trying to get my BU-353 GPS to work in ICS which is running very smoothly.

Did you ever purchase a MK802 or other A10 board? I've been looking into the A10 chip a lot lately, seems like a perfect candidate for a small footprint CarPC. I really want to get my hands on one of the devkits http://www.cnx-software.com/2011/12/...board-and-sdk/. This SoC pack a punch that could definitely broaden some horizons

You may also want to look into the newer Freescale related boards. Have more features. They are "pre mass produced" at the moment for $299 but they will be $199 once officially released. http://boundarydevices.com/ has the newer boards. They are Quad processors with 10/100/1000 LAN ports among the many other ports.

For an older ARM8 based board freescale built one around a 1ghz processor with LOTS of ports for $149.

Both of these boards have fast GPU's on them.. The new i.MX6 board can do some crazy stuff for such a low cost setup.