VIA Launches its Banana PC, i.e. The $49 Android PC

Couple of days ago, WonderMedia (subsidiary of VIA Technologies, which in turn is a subsidiary of Formosa Plastics) announced its latest SoC processors, the 800MHz WM8950 and the faster 1.2GHz WM8850. We’re not sure why exactly the higher number part is the lower-performing one, but we’ll leave that one to you to figure out.

The “ready to boot” $49 APC is now available globally, not just in Mainland China

The WM8850 and WM8950 are already available in VIA reference tablets on the mainland China market, but now the company is going global with its fifty dollar personal computer dubbed APC or Android PC. APC is a motherboard with everything that a baseline computer needs: Neo-ITX motherboard hosts SoC running at 800MHz (WM8950), 512MB of DDR3 memory and 2GB of NAND Flash memory. In order to connect the APC to the display output, you have analog D-SUB or HDMI, while external connectivity is handled by four USB and an Ethernet port.

From the software side, the APC comes with Google Android 4.0 and a “selection of preinstalled apps”, thus you get a fully functional base which can be put in a case and off you go.

According to Richard Brown, VP Marketing at VIA, this Diet PC “brings the familiarity and convenience of Android to the PC at a US$49 price point that will open up exciting new markets and applications.” The company also highlights the power consumption, as the APC “consumes only 4 watts when operating at idle power and 13.5 watts at maximum load. This is ten times less than a standard PC system and ensures significant power savings in large scale deployments.”

APC comes with a 15W power adapter, thus all you need is keyboard, display and a mouse.

Original Author: Theo Valich