The Mac Mini isn’t the only mini-PC in town. Apple manufacturing partner Foxconn has formally announced its new AT-5250 and AT-5600 fanless nano PCs and they’re looking pretty slick. The brushed black finish is a little different than what we saw back in May, but the input/output ports look much the same.

There’s a couple of USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0, Gigabit ethernet, headphone/microphone jacks, multi-card reader, 801.11n Wi-Fi, and HDMI and VGA for video, but there’s word of a possible DVI connection too. The “quiet” Foxconn Nano is said to be up to 40 times smaller than a standard PC, but you obviously can’t expect it to outperform a high-end gaming PC. It is just a nettop, after all, but you do get the convenience of a VESA mount.

The $260 AT-5250 gets a Intel Cedar View D2550 processor (1.8GHz) with integrated Intel GMA 3650 graphics, whereas the $280 AT-5600 gets the AMD Brazos E450 APU (1.65GHz) and Radeon HD 6320 graphics under the hood. Both are expected to use either 2.5-inch/1.8-inch hard drives or 2.5-inch SSDs, but storage is not included. Look for these to ship in September.

[FanlessTech via Foxconn ]

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Want a low-cost $50 Android PC? That’s exactly what VIA is now offering with their Android PC System (APC), which comes in at just 7-inches, featuring an ARM board that comes with a customized Android install. The APC will arrive in July and features a VIA ARM11 SoC, 512MB of RAM, 2GB flash storage, VGA, HDMI, speaker/microphone jacks, ethernet, microSD, and an impressive 4 USB ports.

The board only uses 4 watts when idle or 13.5 under max load, so this is certainly a great choice if you are looking for a low-power option. While I wouldn’t want to use this as my main PC or anything, for use as a hobbyist device, a child’s computer, or even some kind of customized vehicle computer, it could be very useful. At only $50, it’s hard to really feel like you’ve ‘wasted’ money, even if you just buy it to toy around with.

The shear amount of ports on this thing, such as 4 USB, is pretty incredible. I could be wrong, but I highly doubt you’ll get too much out of the video experience with this little guy, still, it’s pretty cool that they threw in an HDMI port. While this isn’t at all alone in the growing market of tiny, low-cost PCs, Via is a reasonably good brand and these are pretty decent specs for just $50.

[ source ]

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A UK developer has taken the wraps off his project to change the world learns. We saw it once with OLPC, where affordable laptops that could be used in schools around the world to educate less fortunate children. Now, David Braben of Frontier Developments has unveiled a prototype of a $25 computer that is the size of a USB stick. We hope this isn’t a hoax like the $35 Android tablet.

Braben’s plan is to have them mass produced by a company so that they can then be given away at schools to children. The mini-computer has a USB port for a keyboard and an HDMI port to output video to a monitor. The OS is Linux Ubuntu and with a 700MHz ARM11 processor on board with 128MB of RAM and OpenGL ES 2.0, the 1080p output would allow students to do everything from surfing the web, checking email and working on documents and spread sheets. The computer also has a 12MP camera for video conferencing and an SD expansion slot.

David Braben explains the raspberry PI scheme designed to give a £15 computer on a stick to every child. He is talking to the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones.

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With all this talk of smartphones and tablets, sometimes we forget that we still need, you know, actual computers. The trouble is that typical desktop computers can suck up quite a bit of power compared to their portable counterparts. Not so with the Trim-Slice from CompuLab.

The Israel-based company has produced what they believe to be its smallest and most energy-efficient model to date. The Trim Slice has a paltry average operational draw of just three watts. It’s like it’s barely there. This lower power consumption is achieved via the NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, even though it is providing a full PC experience.

Remember, this is not a netbook or a notebook. There’s no keyboard or display here; it’s just the PC itself. Even so, the fanless computer rocks a 64GB SSD, 1GB DDR2 RAM, wireless-N, expansion slots, USB ports, HDMI-out, and dual head DVI. They’ve even included S/PDIF for 5.1 surround sound.

Given its small stature and low power consumption, the CompuLab Trim-Slice could be a good candidate for those all-in-one PCs (a la iMac). It would even be easy to mount up in your car. CompuLab is marketing it for “power infotainment systems, digital signage and IPTV, or as a gaming device or desktop PC replacement.”

They haven’t indicated a price, but it should be “lower than a tablet.” Look for the Trim-Slice this April.

[GizMag via CompuLab, Fit-PC]

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