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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The Raspberry Pi is a developer board which brings out the pins of an ARM chip designed for use in low-end tablets. If you want a tablet using the same chip, you can easily buy one. The price point on Alibaba is about $30-$50. Even on Amazon you can get one for $50.

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That's fine, IF those things can be rooted and have released any proprietary drivers so you can load your preferred ARM-compatible Linux distro.

If, however, you want to run Plan 9, RISC OS, FreeBSD, Haiku, or anything else that isn't Linux, then you'd probably still come unstuck regardless of Alibaba's openness.

in terms of buying products from alibaba, most equipment on their uses the MTK tool chain. MTK offers full drivers to run most of their hardware, and can run under a multitude of Android OS is. I also have a friend who took the MTK tool chain and installed debian on his HaiPai Noble N7889 phone. It didn't run very well at all, but it did run.

Actually the Chinese tablets use different SoCs from the RPi - I don't know of any that use a Broadcom one.

Allwinner, Mediatek, Rockchip, and VIA are far more common; and the interesting thing is, it's easier to find hardware-level documentation for many of these than Broadcom's SoCs.

http://linux-sunxi.org/Allwinner_SoC_Family

The chip on the Pi was designed for set-top boxes, not tablets.

The pi is made in the UK, it does not make it better but it might be important for some people.

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