Asus Shipping Sub-$100 Google Chromebit Digital Signage Stick By Summer

March 31, 2015 by Dave Haynes

asus-chromebit

The whole Google does digital signage thing just got even more interesting – with Google via Asus announcing the Chromebit, which is effectively a Chromebox as an HDMI stick.

The units are expected to cost less than $100 USD.

The Chromebits will have a Rockchip processor,  2GB of RAM and 16GB of eMMC flash storage. If I am reading reports correctly, the processor is the Rockchip RK3288, which is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A17 (not a slug). They will run the full Chrome OS.

This is similar in some ways to the Intel Compute Stick announced  a few weeks ago and aimed at the Windows market.

So, you will have a stick on the market for sub-$100 that VERY likely won’t be a buggy piece of crap like many of the Android-driven sticks shipped over by the container from China and sold as media players. The reports I’ve been getting from people testing Chromeboxes say the OS drives a lot of performance out of modestly spec’d devices, so it will be interesting to hear what software companies that are trying Chrome for digital signage think of these units.

The stick are expected to ship this summer.

Here’s the word from Google off one of its blogs. 

 

  1. A very interesting move by ASUS and much welcomed. As you have stated Dave, the spec of the device will happily handle 1080p video and multizone content with a nice smooth ticker (a widely used benchmark for those afficionados of scrolling text).

    As a CMS provider already shipping licences for Chrome OS, what we really like is the ability to build our client once and know that it will work across all Chrome OS devices. You can’t say the same for Android or any other OS that requires custom drivers and software images per box.

    Whilst the Chromebit will not stand up to the robust intentions of the upcoming AOpen devices or even the current range of Chromeboxes; it does offer an interesting and viable option for those on a budget or unconcerned by their digital signage device being a HDMI stick.

    All in all, great news and bring on the Chrome OS digital signage revolution, which sits very nicely as an alternative to the growing number SoC Displays.

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