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Comment by twodayslate | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how much stuff they can fit in a tiny dongle now. 512MB of ram - tower computers barely had that 10 years ago.

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A few years ago I thought it impressive as hell that a several hundred dollar smartphone could have that much. Now for $35...

Even more amazing was the little yellow square about the size of a surface mount resistor was highlighted as 2GB of flash. I couldn't even spot the cyan square for 512MB of ram.

I think you've gotten confused. Step 6 shows the 2GB flash taking up most of the body on the bottom side – you might need to mouse-over the correct image. The RAM takes up about half the neck.

I guess you miss a lot when JS is disabled by default :P

What you're looking at is the die of an LED. Almost made the same mistake myself.

Not really. The Chinese counterpart cram in much better CPUs and overall hardware and are on the market for several months already. Did I mention cheaper?

Which Chinese counterpart?

Just google for "android hdmi". They were all over Hong Kong/Taiwan when I was there earlier this year, and generally just had the latest dual-core Android phone guts in a similar tiny plug-in case.

The cheapest one I could find was $37 with free shipping to the US.

I found this by using google shopper to search for "android hdmi" and sorting low to high.

Here: http://dx.com/p/m2a-android-4-0-network-media-player-w-wi-fi...

Basically double the specs of Chromecast with a USB expansion slot. That said this seems to just run android with wifi on your TV. I'm not an Android person so I'm not sure what the quality of streaming apps are to compare to Chromecast but they serve different purposes.

This is more like an Android version of AppleTV, and as an AppleTV owner I can say that navigating with a remote is horrible, I only use it for Airplay and XBMC. So there's the issue of how usable is Android stick (the pictures look cool but don't say much).

There are many simple media players/streamers out there, in much the same size unit and some with noticeably higher spec (though most probably with noticeably lower build quality) for more-or-less the same price. Most are basic Android devices I think.

Pentium 4s and the early AMD64s could have up to 4GB of RAM. I had 3GB in mine back in 2003. The average consumer might not have had that much though. Anyone playing games or running things like Photoshop had much more than just 512MB.

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