Smart Home Blog

AOpen miniPC is perfect to be used as media PC for home entertainment. It’s stylish, quiet and power enough to replace satellite receiver and DVD player in your living room.
We tested aOpen MP915-X as Plutohome media director. It’s based on Intel Pentium M processor and it’s good for ordinary TV. When we tried to play HD TV it produced some delays and the video decoding took 100% of processor.
Recently aOpen announced MP945-VDR - HD and Vista ready miniPC. It features Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel 945GM OnDie video adapter, Built-in IR receiver, DVI / YPbPr / S-Video / HDMI interface, 5.1 Channel. Additionally it can include TV Tuner, Wireless 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth Module.
MP945-VDR seems cool and we’re going to test it with HD TV and Plutohome. I’m not sure about positive result but we should try.

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Recently Epson lanched Endeavor ST100 micro PC. The 185 x 195 x 75 mm unit (it’s a bit bigger than Mac Mini) features packs an Intel Core 2 Duo (T7200, T7400, or T7600) processor, ATi’s Radeon Xpress 200M graphics chipset, up to 2GB of DDR2 RAM, 40GB to 160GB SATA drive options, and a dual-layer DVD burner. It also sports a set of ports  including VGA, audio in / out, Ethernet, 56k modem, and six USB 2.0 ports with a pair of them being on the front panel.

The Endeavor ST100 micro PC will be sold in Japan at just ¥59,850 ($508).

[via Engadget]

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Home media centers in small form factor are very popular because they blend in compact dimensions and power of desktop PC. Samsung announced its version of this kind of PC - MX10. It’s very similar to LITTLE LLUON and Philips LX1000. The MX10’s got a Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, an ATI Xpress 1100 graphics card, and 200 to 250GB of storage. Its dimensions are 55mm*265mm*295mm. The rest information is missed. But I suspect that MX10 should also include IR port to control via remote, WiFi and maybe Bluetooth.

The Samsung MX10 will go for about $1,265 US.

[via PVR Wire]

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Japanese computer manufactor DosPara produced a real competitor of Mac Mini - Super Mini 2. It contains 4.3-cm thick case 1.66GHz T5500 C2D processor, 512MB of ram, 80GB HDD, a dual-layer DVD burner, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11a/b/g WiFi, a 4-in-1 card reader, DVI and S-Video outs, and a TV tuner (optional).

Spend $1,043 USD and got stylish and quiet media PC in your living room. But IMHO Mac Mini is much better
[via Engadget]

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Once I already wrote about LITTLE LLUON - compact Media Center PC based on AMD Turion and nVidia. Here is a similar one from Philips - LX1000. Featuring a 1.8GHz AMD Turion 64, 1GB of RAM, a 120GB drive, integrated analog/digital TV tuner, WiFi, a dual-layer DVD burner, and NVIDIA GeForce 6600 graphics in a 195 x 58 x 212mm form factor, it can be a competitor of Mac Mini (in spite of its price), especially for Linux users.

However, the price of LX1000 is not so pleasant for a purse - £999 (about $1500).

[via Engadget]

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